Anne Carson Quotes

When I desire you a part of me is gone...

There is a loneliness that fills the plain.
Total.
Lunar.

...I am talking about evil.

It blooms.
It eats.
It grins.

Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.

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

[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 let’s buy it what a bargain!

I went mad, a god hurt me, I fell.

He / thought of women. / What is it like to be a woman / listening in the dark? Black mantle of silence / stretches between them like geothermal pressure. / Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as / lava. She listens / to the blank space where / his consciousness is, moving towards her. Lava can / move as slow as / nine hours per inch. [...] She wonders if / he is listening too. The cruel thing is, she falls asleep / listening.

What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.

Dionysus does not

explain or regret
anything. He is
pleased

if he can cause you to perform,
despite your plan,
despite your politics,

despite your neuroses,
despite even your Dionysian theories of self,
something quite previous,

the desire
before the desire,
the lick of beginning to know you don’t know.

If life is a stage,
that is the show.
Exit Dionysus.

Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried, Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands.

A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

Girls are cruelest to themselves.
Someone like Emily Brontë,
who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman,
had cruelty drifted up in all the cracks of her like spring snow.

I am a drop of gold he would say
I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-

Who does not end up a female impersonator?