Anne Carson Quotes

Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.

Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.

Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches.
Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt.
He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds.
I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.

Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream.

"How does distance look?" is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.

we disappear.
It happens to me frequently. You disappear? Yes and then come back.
Moments of death I call them.

Not touching but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.

When I desire you
a part of me
is gone.

"You used to say. "Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness."
Madness doubled is marriage
I added
when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce
a golden rule."

Small, red, and upright he waited,
gripping his new bookbag tight
in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other,
while the first snows of winter
floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced
all trace of the world.

There is no person without a world.

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘life and no escape.

Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.

Girls are cruelest to themselves.
Someone like Emily Brontë,
who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman,
had cruelty drifted up in all the cracks of her like spring snow.