Marina > Marina's Quotes

“I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”
― Anne Carson (Translator), Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Desire is no light thing.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

“Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.
Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.”
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

“Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.”
― Anne Carson

“Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.”
― Anne Carson

“Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.”
― Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera

“Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“When I desire you
a part of me
is gone.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“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.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“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.”
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

“You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

“Beauty makes me hopeless. I don't care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.”
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that?

And I said,
Where do I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass and God

“Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.”
― Anne Carson

“Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“I suppose you do love me, in your way,” I said to him one night close to dawn when we lay on the narrow bed. “And how else should I love you —in your way?” he asked. I am still thinking about that.”
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

“My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.”
― André Breton, What Is Surrealism?: Selected Writings

“I am not the first person you loved.
You are not the first person I looked at
with a mouthful of forevers. We
have both known loss like the sharp edges
of a knife. We have both lived with lips
more scar tissue than skin. Our love came
unannounced in the middle of the night.
Our love came when we’d given up
on asking love to come. I think
that has to be part
of its miracle.
This is how we heal.
I will kiss you like forgiveness. You
will hold me like I’m hope. Our arms
will bandage and we will press promises
between us like flowers in a book.
I will write sonnets to the salt of sweat
on your skin. I will write novels to the scar
of your nose. I will write a dictionary
of all the words I have used trying
to describe the way it feels to have finally,
finally found you.

And I will not be afraid
of your scars.

I know sometimes
it’s still hard to let me see you
in all your cracked perfection,
but please know:
whether it’s the days you burn
more brilliant than the sun
or the nights you collapse into my lap
your body broken into a thousand questions,
you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I will love you when you are a still day.
I will love you when you are a hurricane.”
― Clementine von Radics

“All this time
I drank you like the cure when maybe
you were the poison.”
― Clementine von Radics

“If anyone else were to kiss me, all they would taste is your name.”
― Clementine von Radics

“I wonder if you know yet that you’ll leave me. That you are a child playing with matches and I have a paper body. You will meet a girl with a softer voice and stronger arms and she will not have violent secrets or an affection for red wine or eyes that never stay dry. You will fall into her bed and I’ll go back to spending Friday nights with boys who never learn my last name. ”
― Clementine von Radics