Anne Carson Quotes

She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?

Are there many little boys who think they are a
Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the
Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him
Joyfully

CHORUS: Helen! wild mad Helen
you murdered so many beneath Troy.
Now you’ve crowned yourself one final perfect time,
a crown of blood that will not wash away.
Strife walks with you everywhere you go.

KLYTAIMESTRA: Oh, stop whining.
And why get angry at Helen?
As if she singlehandedly destroyed those multitudes of men.
As if she all alone made this wound in us

"Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue green shoots and the plant called "audacity", which poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. ... I will do anything to escape boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough."

Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.

It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again.

Now I think it is true to say of the road, and also of God, that it does not move. At the same time, it is everywhere. It has a language, but not one I know. It has a story, but I am in it. So are you. And to realize this is a moment of some sadness. When we are denied a story, a light goes off. I am asking you to study the dark.

In myth, women's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity.

There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me.

You read a hundred
military manuals you won't
find the word kill they trick
you into killing.

Three days
(so I hear)
she is without food,
keeps her body
pure of bread, longs to
run herself aground
in a sad secret death.

Is it a god inside you, girl?

DEATH
. . .
And now you are here to fight for this woman.
You know her promise is given.
She has to die or her husband won't go free.

APOLLO
Relax, I'm not breaking any laws.

DEATH
Why the bow, if you're breaking no laws?

APOLLO
I always carry a bow, it's my trademark.

It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.

Look at me. This is nobility in a man:
to bear what falls from the gods and not say No.