Anne Carson Quotes

Depression is one of the unknown modes of being.
There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity.
All language can register is the slow return
to oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape
and habit blurs perception and language
takes up its routine flourishes.

…..in that blurred state between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul. Like the terrestial crust of the earth which is proportionately 10 times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul is a miracle of mutual pressures. Millions of kilograms of force pounding up from earth’s core on the inside to meet the cold air of the world and stop as we do, just in time.

What are we made of but hunger and rage?

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

Your grief is as great as your splendor was: some god is weighing the one out equal to the other.

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.

I can feel that other day running underneath this one
like an old videotape

Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream.

And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces, night at their back.

He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.

Look at me. This is nobility in a man:
to bear what falls from the gods and not say No.

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 web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

And now time is rushing towards them

where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,

night at their back.

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

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
She shifted to a question about airports.