Top 15 Anne Carson Quotes

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

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

To feel anything
deranges you. To be seen
feeling anything strips you
naked. In the grip of it
pleasure or pain doesn’t
matter. You think what
will they do what new
power will they acquire if
they see me naked like
this. If they see you
feeling. You have no idea
what. It’s not about them.
To be seen is the penalty.

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

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.

Desire is no light thing.

Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.
Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.

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.

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

What would it be like
to live in a library
of melted books.

With sentences streaming over the floor
and all the punctuation
settled to the bottom as a residue.

It would be confusing.
Unforgivable.
A great adventure.

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

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

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.

Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.