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Everything depends on liking the people and trusting the people. You have to assume that whatever they do will be as good as you want the thing to be and just go ahead with that.
Anne Carson -
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
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We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life.
Anne Carson -
We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.
Anne Carson -
Do you remember when they taught cursive in schools? I think they don't anymore. But I still enjoy it - just the physical act and all the - the whole business of making a thing out of language.
Anne Carson -
Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
Anne Carson -
As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be.
Anne Carson -
Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.
Anne Carson
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To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
Anne Carson -
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 -
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 -
Under the seams runs the pain.
Anne Carson -
The Greek language seems different than other languages. I'm not the only person to think this. Usually, I come up with some kind of dopey metaphor for why it's different. But it seems, somehow, more original, more like being in the morning of language.
Anne Carson -
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
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I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.
Anne Carson -
I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they're both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that's almost happening, never quite totally happening.
Anne Carson -
What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
Anne Carson -
Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
Anne Carson -
It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
Anne Carson -
It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
Anne Carson
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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 -
Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you've made something, it'll - the world will be different.
Anne Carson -
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 -
No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light.
Anne Carson