Top 160 Anne Carson Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.”

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Anne Carson

58. “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

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

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

62. “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

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

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

65. “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

66. “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

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

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Anne Carson

72. “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

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. “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

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

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

80. “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

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

— Anne Carson

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Anne Carson

87. “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

88. “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

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

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

91. “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

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

— Anne Carson

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “26. Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia.”

— Anne Carson

98. “I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was the main thing of my life.”

— Anne Carson

99. “Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.”

— Anne Carson

100. “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?”

— Anne Carson