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3a69d10
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Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
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Anne Carson (Translator) |
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63cbd72
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Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
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touching
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Anne Carson |
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48e39b0
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Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you. Have you given much thought to our mortal condition? Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen. There's no one alive who can say if he will be tomorrow. Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery. No one can teach it, no one can grasp it. Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink! But don't forget Aphrodite--that's You can let the rest go. Am I making sense? I think so. How about a drink. Put on a garla..
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mortality
death
sadness
happiness
life
cheer
comedy
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Anne Carson |
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af1493f
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A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
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Anne Carson |
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46d7c09
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Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches. Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt. He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds. I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.
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Anne Carson |
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5f07b7c
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He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
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Anne Carson |
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4795970
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When they made love Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down from the base of the neck to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.
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carson
autobiography-of-red
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Anne Carson |
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fa80e70
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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.
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love
possibilities
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Anne Carson |
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84549d2
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Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
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life
road
journey
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Anne Carson |
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da717e8
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They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
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Anne Carson |
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53e4b0c
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There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you--may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] ..
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Anne Carson |
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665c2ad
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Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
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Anne Carson |
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dbd0b4f
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Depression is one of the unknown modes of being. There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity. All language can register is the slow return to oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape and habit blurs perception and language takes up its routine flourishes.
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Anne Carson |
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b39c9be
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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.
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snow
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Anne Carson |
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3428d75
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Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
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Anne Carson |
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73c5371
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You used to say. "Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness." Madness doubled is marriage I added when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce a golden rule."
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Anne Carson |
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c2021f7
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There is no person without a world.
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mitwelt
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Anne Carson |
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ca53fcd
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The jacket shifted. Geryon peered out.
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privacy
introversion
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Anne Carson |
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727becb
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Now every mortal has pain and sweat is constant, but if there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me. We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life. We know no other. The underworld's a blank and all the rest just fantasy.
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mortality
living
life
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Anne Carson |
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aa71cc3
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How does distance look?" is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved." --
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Anne Carson |
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90b37e5
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When I desire you a part of me is gone.
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Anne Carson |
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be6659f
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We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.
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Anne Carson |
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d658d17
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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.
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Anne Carson |
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026180b
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Not touching but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.
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Anne Carson |
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0f099f7
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M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more
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Anne Carson |
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e366aa9
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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.
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Anne Carson |
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6145fb8
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You could take the entirety of the common sense of humans and put it in the palm of your hand and still have room for your dick.
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humans
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Anne Carson |
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f5a1c62
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Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...
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words
translation
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Anne Carson |
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15e51da
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A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.
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eros-the-bittersweet
thinking
knowledge
thought
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Anne Carson |
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21407bb
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You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where do I put it down?
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Anne Carson |
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942cb60
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Repression speaks about sex better than any other form of discourse / or so the modern experts maintain. How do people / get power over one another? is an algebraic question
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Anne Carson |
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eed1ce7
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You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.
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Anne Carson |
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2b4d1a5
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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. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?
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Anne Carson |
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30c90cc
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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.
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Anne Carson |
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920f6ed
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Consider incompleteness as a verb.
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Anne Carson |
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02047a1
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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.
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Anne Carson |
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e1a3a1b
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Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
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literature
reading
writing
philosophy
eros-the-bittersweet
novels
writing-craft
eros
desire
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Anne Carson |
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6a0e0c3
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A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
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Anne Carson |
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4fd9593
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Girls are cruelest to themselves. Someone like Emily Bronte, 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.
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poem
poetry
women
self-cruelty
the-glass-essay
girls
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Anne Carson |
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d807656
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Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evil but if some god shakes your house ruin arrives ruin does not leave it comes tolling over the generations it comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floor and all your thrashed coasts groan
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tragedy
sophocles
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Anne Carson |
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1ca3d7f
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Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days.
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Anne Carson |
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a362ee2
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Four of the roses were on fire. They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets and howling colossal intimacies from the back of their fused throats. - XXVII. MITWELT
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Anne Carson |
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a43b47f
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What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone else's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away. Part of what you enjoy in a documentary technique is the sense of banditry. To loot someone else's life or sentences and make off with a point of view, which is called "objective" because you can make anything into an object by treating it this way, is exciting and dangerous."
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Anne Carson |
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588afaa
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Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling
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poetry
love
essay
shopping
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Anne Carson |