What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning. Anne Carson More Quotes by Anne Carson More Quotes From Anne Carson 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 greeknamessomewhere-else Caught between the tongue and the taste. Anne Carson tonguecaughttaste I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me. Anne Carson groupstraditionkind My religion makes no sense Anne Carson help-medoehelping Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling. Anne Carson yellingsoundreality A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. Anne Carson attractivepagestea Poetry - poiesis means a thing made. Anne Carson mademean To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing. Anne Carson mythendspast He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet. Anne Carson gertrudedifficultpoet A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive. Anne Carson timemeanmoving No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light. Anne Carson tunnelslightneeds When I desire you a part of me is gone. Anne Carson gonedesire Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time. Anne Carson cheerdreamsweet 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. Anne Carson blockmiraclewhite A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen. Anne Carson hungrypopulationlanguage Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion. Anne Carson abstractionmadetime Do you remember when they taught cursive in schools? I think they don't anymore. But I still enjoy it - just the physical act and all the - the whole business of making a thing out of language. Anne Carson taughtschoolthinking 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. Anne Carson affairyouththinking 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 struggletalkingmean What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall. Anne Carson wallsimplemoving
