Anne Carson Quotes

A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

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.

Free marks are a gesture of rage. One of the oldest myths we have of this gesture is the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of paradise. Why did Eve put a free mark on that apple? To say she was seduced by the snake or longing for absolute knowledge or in search of immortality are posterior analytics. Isn’t the simple fact of the matter that she was bored?

All lovers believe they are inventing love.

Four of the roses were on fire.
They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets
and howling colossal intimacies
from the back of their fused throats.
- XXVII. MITWELT

It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.

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

Three days
(so I hear)
she is without food,
keeps her body
pure of bread, longs to
run herself aground
in a sad secret death.

Is it a god inside you, girl?

You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.

I don't want to be a person. I want to be unbearable.

It is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now.
This is not uncommon after loss of love — blue and black and red blasting the crater open.
I am interested in anger.

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

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

The beloved's innocence
brutalizes the lover.
As the singing of a mad person
behind you on the train
enrages you,
its beautiful
animal-like teeth
shining amid black planes
of paint.
As Helen
enrages history.

Senza uscita.

Note that the word 'mute' is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing to be seen hiding.