Anne Carson is a talented poet, essayist and classics professor who has earned acclaim for her unique blend of poetry and prose.
She’s translated works by ancient writers like Sappho and Euripides and won numerous awards including the Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships.
Born in Toronto in 1950, Carson developed a love for ancient Greek literature which greatly influences her work today.
Her famous works include “Autobiography of Red” and “The Beauty of the Husband” which both challenge traditional poetry forms.
Carson sees herself more as a visual artist and has expressed a desire to explore beyond traditional book formats in her future works.
I have selected the top quotes by Anne Carson.
Top 10 Anne Carson Quotes
Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue. ~ Anne Carson.
You are a person in love with the impossible. ~ Anne Carson.
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing. ~ Anne Carson.
Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty. ~ Anne Carson.
If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence. ~ Anne Carson.
If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it. ~ Anne Carson.
I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. ~ Anne Carson.
Under the seams runs the pain. ~ Anne Carson.
God’s pity! How long will it feel like burning? ~ Anne Carson.
I don’t want to be a person. I want to be unbearable. ~ Anne Carson.
Famous Anne Carson Quotes
Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn’t a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project. ~ Anne Carson.
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time. ~ Anne Carson.
A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. ~ Anne Carson.
Order streamed from Noah in blue triangles and as the pure fury of his classifications rose around him, engulfing his life, they came to be called waves by others, who drowned, a world of them. ~ Anne Carson.
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. ~ Anne Carson.
I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t. ~ Anne Carson.
There is no person without a world. ~ 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.
Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion. ~ Anne Carson.
Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake. ~ Anne Carson.
What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure. ~ Anne Carson.
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief. ~ Anne Carson.
When I desire you a part of me is gone… ~ Anne Carson.
The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind. ~ Anne Carson.
Best Anne Carson Quotes
It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together. ~ 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.
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world. ~ Anne Carson.
Caught between the tongue and the taste. ~ Anne Carson.
What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning. ~ Anne Carson.
I prayed and fasted. I read the mystics. I studied the martyrs. I began to think I was someone thirsting for God. ~ Anne Carson.
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope. ~ Anne Carson.
Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary. ~ Anne Carson.
Desire is no light thing. ~ Anne Carson.
Popular Anne Carson Quotes
Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am. ~ Anne Carson.
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling. ~ Anne Carson.
All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies. ~ Anne Carson.
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go. ~ Anne Carson.
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. ~ Anne Carson.
Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty. ~ Anne Carson.
It takes practice to shave the skin off the light. ~ 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.
The moon makes a traveler hunger for something bitter in the world, what is it? I will vanish; others will come here, what is that? An old question. ~ Anne Carson.
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was. ~ 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.
Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness. ~ Anne Carson.
Wise Anne Carson Quotes
I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things. ~ Anne Carson.
A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen. ~ Anne Carson.
Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing. ~ Anne Carson.
We live by waters breaking out of the heart. ~ Anne Carson.
Some conversations are not about what they’re about. ~ Anne Carson.
Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it’s more scary to draw. It’s more revealing. You can’t disguise yourself in drawing. ~ Anne Carson.
When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty. ~ Anne Carson.
The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death. ~ Anne Carson.
Consider incompleteness as a verb. ~ Anne Carson.
Powerful Anne Carson Quotes
It stung God. They say his spinal cord ran straight out of the sun. ~ Anne Carson.
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive. ~ Anne Carson.
Kinds of water drown us. Kinds of water do not. ~ Anne Carson.
We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves. ~ Anne Carson.
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do. ~ Anne Carson.
They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics. ~ Anne Carson.
At least half of your mind is always thinking, I’ll be leaving; this won’t last. It’s a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I’m just sad. ~ Anne Carson.
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. ~ Anne Carson.
As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this. ~ Anne Carson.
So these were the 67 popular quotes about Anne Carson.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Abe Lemons quotes and Roy Rogers quotes.
