Rose > Rose's Quotes

“[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!”
― Anne Carson, Short Talks

“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.”
― Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera

“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.”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“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.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

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

“If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it".”
― Anne Carson

“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.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

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

“Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.

I can feel that other day running underneath this one
like an old videotape”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“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.”
― Anne Carson, Nox

“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.”
― Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos

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

“I prayed and fasted. I read the mystics. I studied the martyrs. I began to think I was someone thirsting for God.”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“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.”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again.”
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

“at the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved…”
― Anne Carson, Red Doc>

“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.”
― Anne Carson, An Oresteia

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

“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.”
― Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours

“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.”
― 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

“To feel anything
deranges you. To be seen
feeling anything strips you
naked. In the grip of it
pleasure or pain doesn’t
matter. You think what
will they do what new
power will they acquire if
they see me naked like
this. If they see you
feeling. You have no idea
what. It’s not about them.
To be seen is the penalty.”
― Anne Carson, Red Doc>

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

“To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“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

“What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

“Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

“The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet