Anne Carson Quotes

…..in that blurred state between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul. Like the terrestial crust of the earth which is proportionately 10 times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul is a miracle of mutual pressures. Millions of kilograms of force pounding up from earth’s core on the inside to meet the cold air of the world and stop as we do, just in time.

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

I am a restrained person.
Otherwise my heart would race past my
tongue to pour out everything.
Instead I mumble,
I gnaw myself.
I lose hope.
And my mind is burning.

Grief and rage — you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you — may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.

Your grief is as great as your splendor was: some god is weighing the one out equal to the other.

"If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it".

M: Is he smart
I: She yes very smart sees right through me
M: In my day we valued blindness rather more

We are slaves to the gods. Whatever gods are.

I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.

Consider incompleteness as a verb.

And now time is rushing towards them

where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,

night at their back.

I am a drop of gold he would say
I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-

Antigone: We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us.
Ismene: Who said that?
Antigone: Hegel.
Ismene: Sounds more like Beckett.
Antigone: He was paraphrasing Hegel.
Ismene: I don't think so.

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

Geryon was a monster everything about him was red