Top 160 Anne Carson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”

— Anne Carson

2. “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

3. “Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.”

— Anne Carson

4. “To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.”

— Anne Carson

5. “Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.”

— Anne Carson

6. “Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.”

— Anne Carson

7. “One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.”

— Anne Carson

8. “Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.”

— Anne Carson

9. “Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.”

— Anne Carson

10. “I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.”

— Anne Carson

11. “It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.”

— Anne Carson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

12. “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”

— Anne Carson

13. “Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.”

— Anne Carson

14. “We are slaves to the gods. Whatever gods are.”

— Anne Carson

15. “Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”

— Anne Carson

16. “Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.”

— Anne Carson

17. “Desire is no light thing.”

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

19. “Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”

— Anne Carson

20. “At least half of your mind is always thinking, I’ll be leaving; this won’t last. It’s a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I’m just sad.”

— Anne Carson

21. “A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.”

— Anne Carson

22. “We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.”

— Anne Carson

23. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

24. “Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.”

— Anne Carson

25. “It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.”

— Anne Carson

26. “You are a person in love with the impossible.”

— Anne Carson

27. “Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it’s more scary to draw. It’s more revealing. You can’t disguise yourself in drawing.”

— Anne Carson

28. “When I desire you a part of me is gone...”

— Anne Carson

29. “Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream.”

— Anne Carson

30. “A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.”

— Anne Carson

31. “Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.”

— Anne Carson

32. “A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.”

— Anne Carson

33. “The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.”

— Anne Carson

34. “Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger.”

— Anne Carson

35. “Like honey is the sleep of the just.”

— Anne Carson

36. “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

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

— Anne Carson

38. “Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn’t a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project.”

— Anne Carson

39. “Consider incompleteness as a verb.”

— Anne Carson

40. “When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.”

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

42. “Under the seams runs the pain.”

— Anne Carson

43. “There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don’t think I can imitate it, but there’s a density to it that I think I’m always trying to push towards in English.”

— Anne Carson

44. “You see the sun? – I built that.”

— Anne Carson

45. “I am someone who did not die when I should have died.”

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

47. “Kinds of water drown us. Kinds of water do not.”

— Anne Carson

48. “The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.”

— Anne Carson

49. “They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.”

— Anne Carson

50. “You used to say. “Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.” Madness doubled is marriage I added when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce a golden rule.”

— Anne Carson