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.

Anne Carson

Categorized in : Stories Risk Quality

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Anne Carson

bounce ifs want

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

Anne Carson

life-is writing way

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

Anne Carson

quality pain principles

What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.

Anne Carson

quota orange cutting

Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

Anne Carson

pain love moving

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

Anne Carson

too-much mother remember

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

Anne Carson

bittersweet want running

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Anne Carson

grief tragedy doe

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

Anne Carson

writing two mean

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.

Anne Carson

issues self love-you

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

soul stories people

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

poverty self answers

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

Anne Carson

taken giving world

Under the seams runs the pain.

Anne Carson

pain running

[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.

Anne Carson

government hurt mother

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.

Anne Carson

mad animal beautiful

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

emptiness god would-be

Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.

Anne Carson

keys dream writing

Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.

Anne Carson

who-i-am night lying

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

Anne Carson

greek names somewhere-else