Anne Carson Quotes

Who does not end up a female impersonator?

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?

If you pick a flower, if you snatch a handbag, if you possess a woman, if you plunder a storehouse, ravage a countryside or occupy a city, you are a taker. You are taking. In ancient Greek you use the verb άρπάζειν, which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapere, raptus sum and gives us English rapture and rape — words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world. Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.

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

how is a Greek chorus like a lawyer
they’re both in the business of searching for a precedent
finding an analogy
locating a prior example
so as to be able to say
this terrible thing we’re witnessing now is
not unique you know it happened before
or something much like it
we’re not at a loss how to think about this
we’re not without guidance
there is a pattern
we can find an historically parallel case
and file it away under
ANTIGONE BURIED ALIVE FRIDAY AFTERNOON
COMPARE CASE HISTORIES 7, 17 AND 49
now I could dig up those case histories
tell you about Danaos and Lykourgos and the sons of Phineus
people locked up in a room or a cave or their own dark mind
it wouldn’t help you
it doesn’t help me
it’s Friday afternoon
there goes Antigone to be buried alive

...some hours later they were down
at the railroad tracks
standing close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overhead
scattering drops of itself.

We live by waters breaking out of the heart.

XXIV. And kneeling at the edge of the transparent sea I shall shape for myself a new heart from salt and mud

"perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poem
from the last years of her life that begins
"I lose my screams"
dear Antigone,
I take it as the task of the translator
to forbid that you should ever lose your screams"

Your voice I know. It had me terrified. When I hear it in dreams, from time to time all my life, it sounds like a taunt — but dreams distort sound, for they send it over many waters. During these hard days, I, a pilgrim, am giving my consideration to this. I trudge along the bottom of the river and the questioning goes on in me. What are we made of but hunger and rage? His heels rise and fall in front of me. How surprised I am to be entangled in the knowledge of some other animal.

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

My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

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.

PYLADES: I'll take care of you.
ORESTES: It's rotten work.
PYLADES: Not to me. Not if it's you.

Nighthawks

I wanted to run away with you tonight
but you are a difficult woman
the rules of you -

Past and future circle round us
now we know more now less
in the institute of shadows.

On a street black as widows
with nothing to confess
our distances found us

the rules of you -
so difficult a woman
I wanted to run away with you tonight.