Anne Carson Quotes

I prayed and fasted. I read the mystics. I studied the martyrs. I began to think I was someone thirsting for God.

[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.

You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.

he stood against the wind and let it peel him
clean

What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone else’s orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away. Part of what you enjoy in a documentary technique is the sense of banditry. To loot someone else’s life or sentences and make off with a point of view, which is called “objective” because you can make anything into an object by treating it this way, is exciting and dangerous.

Friends disappear
or they are powerless.
This is what misfortune means
an acid test of friendship.
I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

What are we made of but hunger and rage?

A wound gives off its own light
surgeons say.
If all the lamps in the house were turned out
you could dress this wound
by what shines from it.

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

My mother forbad 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.

Humans in love are terrible. You see them come hungering at one another like prehistoric wolves, you see something struggling for life in between them like a root or a soul and it flares for a moment, then they smash it. The difference between them smashes the bones out. So delicate the bones.

[Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let’s buy it what a bargain!

at the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved…

It was the hour when snow goes blue
and streetlights come on and a hare may
pause on the tree line as still as a word in a book.

Where does unbelief begin?
When I was young

there were degrees of certainty.
I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands.
Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands
occasionally disappear–