Anne Carson Quotes

Consider incompleteness as a verb.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

...there it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness.

to carry one's own door will make a person
clumsy, tired and strange
on the other hand, it may come in useful
if you go places that don't have an obvious way in, like normality
or an obvious way out, like the classic double bind

We live by waters breaking out of the heart.

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

When you are falling in love it is always already too late: dēute, as the poets say.

Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else. Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue-green shoots and the plant called “audacity,” which poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. The marks construct an instant of nature gradually, without the boredom of a story. I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

All lovers believe they are inventing love.

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

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.

I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short morphe in greek means the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside your all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can’t start writing something down til I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn’t say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is.

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.

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?