277 Quotes by Anne Carson

To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?' asks a dog in a novel I read once (Virginia Woolf Flush 87). I wonder what the smell of nothing is. Smell of autopsy.

My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

NighthawksI wanted to run away with you tonightbut you are a difficult womanthe rules of you - Past and future circle round usnow we know more now lessin the institute of shadows.On a street black as widowswith nothing to confessour distances found usthe rules of you - so difficult a womanI wanted to run away with you tonight.

What is a Lamb of God? People use this phrase.I don't know.I watch my sister, fingers straying absently about her mustache,no help there.

Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied.

Campaign Against Akhmatova Begins (1922)She ran from lamppost to lamppost, the wind slammed.Trotsky reviewed her in Pravda: One reads with dismay...and an unofficial Communist Party resolution banned her poetry (1925).She didn't notice, didn't know what a Communist Party was in those days.Fog choked the city.Russia's great poets were all about 35 years olScraggly trees wandered by the canal in dim sun.

détailsAll the same there are some small questions one would like to put to Sokrates. Or better still Sappho. Avec tes mains brûlées.

Under the seams runs the pain.

When they made loveGeryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' backas it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way downfrom the base of the neckto the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.