277 Quotes by Anne Carson

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

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.

You remember too much,my mother said to me recently.Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?

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

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

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.

[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.

Girls are cruelest to themselves.Someone like Emily Brontë,who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman,had cruelty drifted up in all the cracks of her like spring snow.

That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attemptedalthough married six months.Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not surewe got it right.He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.Early next dayI wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had publishedin a small quarterly magazine.Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.Or should I say ideal.Neither of us had ever seen Venice.