Anne Carson Quotes

Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.

Now every mortal has pain
and sweat is constant,
but if there is anything dearer than being alive,
it's dark to me.
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth — we call it life. We know no other.
The underworld's a blank
and all the rest just fantasy.

DEATH
. . .
And now you are here to fight for this woman.
You know her promise is given.
She has to die or her husband won't go free.

APOLLO
Relax, I'm not breaking any laws.

DEATH
Why the bow, if you're breaking no laws?

APOLLO
I always carry a bow, it's my trademark.

The fact is that there are people, good people who,
not because they want to
but all the same,
fall in love with the wrong thing.

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM

[all snap flags]
Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.

She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?

The red world And corresponding red breezes
Went on Geryon did not

When they made love
Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back
as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down
from the base of the neck
to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.

CHORUS: Helen! wild mad Helen
you murdered so many beneath Troy.
Now you’ve crowned yourself one final perfect time,
a crown of blood that will not wash away.
Strife walks with you everywhere you go.

KLYTAIMESTRA: Oh, stop whining.
And why get angry at Helen?
As if she singlehandedly destroyed those multitudes of men.
As if she all alone made this wound in us

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

I will not stop singing
the Muses who set me dancing.

Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.