Top 160 Anne Carson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.”

— Anne Carson

52. “Caught between the tongue and the taste.”

— Anne Carson

53. “Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.”

— Anne Carson

54. “If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it”.”

— Anne Carson

55. “All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.”

— Anne Carson

56. “Some conversations are not about what they’re about.”

— Anne Carson

57. “What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.”

— Anne Carson

58. “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

59. “Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.”

— Anne Carson

60. “All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.”

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

62. “XXIV. And kneeling at the edge of the transparent sea I shall shape for myself a new heart from salt and mud.”

— Anne Carson

63. “Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried, Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands.”

— Anne Carson

64. “I don’t want to be a person. I want to be unbearable.”

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

66. “How does distance look?” is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.”

— Anne Carson

67. “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

68. “I went mad, a god hurt me, I fell.”

— Anne Carson

69. “When I contemplate the physical spaces that articulate the letters ‘I love you’ in a written text, I may be led to think about other spaces, for example the space that lies between ‘you’ in the text and you in my life.”

— Anne Carson

70. “We live by waters breaking out of the heart.”

— Anne Carson

71. “I don’t know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That’s where the mind moves, that’s what’s new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people’s heads for a long time.”

— Anne Carson

72. “As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this.”

— Anne Carson

73. “Repent means “the pain again.”

— Anne Carson

74. “Order streamed from Noah in blue triangles and as the pure fury of his classifications rose around him, engulfing his life, they came to be called waves by others, who drowned, a world of them.”

— Anne Carson

75. “What are we made of but hunger and rage?”

— Anne Carson

76. “The moon makes a traveler hunger for something bitter in the world, what is it? I will vanish; others will come here, what is that? An old question.”

— Anne Carson

77. “All lovers believe they are inventing love.”

— Anne Carson

78. “We’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy.”

— Anne Carson

79. “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

80. “It stung God. They say his spinal cord ran straight out of the sun.”

— Anne Carson

81. “Small, red, and upright he waited, gripping his new bookbag tight in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other, while the first snows of winter floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced all trace of the world.”

— Anne Carson

82. “Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.”

— Anne Carson

83. “Love does not happen without loss of vital self. The lover is the loser. Or so he reckons. But his reckoning involves a.”

— Anne Carson

84. “God’s pity! How long will it feel like burning?”

— Anne Carson

85. “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

86. “Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floorand all your thrashed coasts groan.”

— Anne Carson

87. “And for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness.”

— Anne Carson

88. “I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.”

— Anne Carson

89. “There is no person without a world.”

— Anne Carson

90. “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

91. “The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions.”

— Anne Carson

92. “There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.”

— Anne Carson

93. “Your voice I know. It had me terrified. When I hear it in dreams, from time to time all my life, it sounds like a taunt – but dreams distort sound, for they send it over many waters. During these hard days, I, a pilgrim, am giving my consideration to this. I trudge along the bottom of the river and the questioning goes on in me. What are we made of but hunger and rage? His heels rise and fall in front of me. How surprised I am to be entangled in the knowledge of some other animal.”

— Anne Carson

94. “Facts are bigger in the dark.”

— Anne Carson

95. “What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.”

— Anne Carson

96. “Note that the word ‘mute’ is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing to be seen hiding.”

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

98. “Do you have change for a dollar? Geryon heard Geryon say. No. Herakles stared straight at Geryon. But I’ll give you a quarter for free. Why would you do that? I believe in being gracious. Some hours later they were down at the railroad tracks standing close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overhead scattering drops of itself. You’re cold, said Herakles suddenly, your hands are cold. Here. He put Geryon’s hands inside his shirt.”

— Anne Carson

99. “The beloved’s innocence brutalizes the lover. As the singing of a mad person behind you on the train enrages you, its beautiful animal-like teeth shining amid black planes of paint. As Helen enrages history. Senza uscita.”

— Anne Carson

100. “I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don’t gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.”

— Anne Carson