Quotes by Anne Carson

About Anne Carson:

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980-1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow. and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

Anne Carson

Small, red, and upright he waited, gripping his new bookbag tight in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other, while the first snows of winter floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and sile...

Anne Carson

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Anne Carson

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking w...

Anne Carson

[Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling

Anne Carson

Pilgrims were people glad to take off their clothing, which was on fire.

Anne Carson

On the Rules of Perspective A bad trick. Mistake. Dishonesty. These are the views of Braque. Why? Braque rejected perspective. Why? Someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing that man has one eye, Braque felt. Braque wanted to...

Anne Carson

You could take the entirety of the common sense of humans and put it in the palm of your hand and still have room for your dick.

Anne Carson

To anything deranges you. To be seen anything strips you naked. In the grip of it pleasure or pain doesn’t matter. You think what will they do what new power will they acquire If they see you . You have no idea . It’s not about . To be seen is th...

Anne Carson

at the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved…

Anne Carson

You read a hundred military manuals you won't find the word kill they trick you into killing.

Anne Carson

I don't know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That's where the mind moves, that's what's new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people's heads for a long time.

Anne Carson

I never had much education in English poetry as such.

Anne Carson

Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing.

Anne Carson

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this ...

Anne Carson

I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.

Anne Carson

I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was...

Anne Carson

We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.

Anne Carson

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.

Anne Carson

There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.

Anne Carson

Author Bio

  • NameAnne Carson
  • DescriptionCanadian poet
  • BornJune 21, 1950
  • CountryCanada
  • ProfessionLinguist; Poet; Author; Translator
  • WorksAutobiography Of Red
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellows Program; Member Of The Order Of Canada