Tragedy is not concerned with human justice. Tragedy is the statement of an expiation, but not he miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement organized by the knaves for the fools. The tragic figure represents the expiation of the original sin, of the original and eternal sin of... having been born.

— Anne Carson

Anne Carson Quotes

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

Are there two ways of knowing the world – a submissive and a devouring way?

— Anne Carson

Desire is not simple. In Greek the act of love is a mingling and desire melts the limbs. Boundaries of body, category of thought, are confounded.

— Anne Carson

All lovers believe they are inventing love.

— Anne Carson

Geryon watched the top of Herakles’ head and felt his limits returning. Nothing to say. Nothing.

— Anne Carson

In Geryon’s autobiography this page has a photograph of some red rabbit giggle tied with a white ribbon. He has titled it “Jealous of My Little Sensations.

— Anne Carson

Water! Out from between two crouching masses of the world the word leapt. – – – – It was raining on his face. He forgot for a moment that he was a brokenheart then he remembered. Sick lurch downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock to return to the cut soul.

— Anne Carson

Beginnings are special because most of them are fake.

— Anne Carson

The poached egg on your plate at breakfast is not dirt. The poached egg on page 202 of the Greek lexicon in the library of the British Museum is dirt.

— Anne Carson

There is a moment when the water is not in one vessel nor in the other.

— Anne Carson

Jealousy is a dance in which everyone moves, for it is the instability of the emotional situation that preys upon a jealous lover’s mind.

— Anne Carson

Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.

— Anne Carson

I shall wash blood with blood to get rid of the defilement –.

— Anne Carson

How long will it feel like burning, said the child trying to be kind.

— Anne Carson

Don’t want to be free want to be with you.

— Anne Carson

I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.

— Anne Carson

I cannot not grieve.

— Anne Carson

A translator is someone trying to get in between a body and its shadow.

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general. It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.

— Anne Carson
More Anne Carson Quote >>
Privacy Policy   5.90ms  0.71MB