Anne Carson

“Free marks are a gesture of rage. One of the oldest myths we have of this gesture is the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of paradise. Why did Eve put a free mark on that apple? To say she was seduced by the snake or longing for absolute knowledge or in search of immortality are posterior analytics. Isn’t the simple fact of the matter that she was bored?”

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

“...Heracles was strangely silent. What is he thinking? / Geryon wondered. / Geryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts. / Even when they were lovers / he had never known what Herakles was thinking. Once in a while he would say, / Penny for your thoughts! / and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumper sticker or a dish / he'd eaten in a Chinese restaurant years ago. / What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them / developed a dangerous cloud.”

“Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.”

“English is a bitch”

“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] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.”

“we disappear.It happens to me frequently. You disappear? Yes and then come back.Moments of death I call them.”

“It was not fear of ridicule,to which everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated Geryon early in life,but this blank desertion of his own mindthat threw him into despair.”

“trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shockto return to the cut soul.”

“he stood against the wind and let it peel himclean”

“I am a drop of gold he would sayI am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-”

“There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me.”

“There is no person without a world.”

“They were two superior eelsat the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.”

“It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.”

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

“...And tonight—Geryon? You okay?Yes fine, I'm listening. Tonight—?Why do you have your jacket over your head?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Can't hear you Geryon. The jacket shifted. Geryon peered out. I said sometimesI need a little privacy.”

“Town of the Dragon VeinIf you wake up too early listen for it.A sort of inverted whistling the sound of sound.Being withdrawn after all where?Does all the sound in the world.Come from day after day?From mountains but.They have to give it back.At night just.As your nightly dreams.Are taps.Open reversely.In.To.Time.”

“The beloved's innocencebrutalizes the lover.As the singing of a mad personbehind you on the trainenrages you,its beautifulanimal-like teethshining amid black planesof paint.As Helenenrages history.Senza uscita.”

“The fact that Anna is somewherehaving coffee or a dreamis an assault on me.I hate these moments of poverty.What does man eat? ask the phenomenologists.Like the dogs, names,down there,starving.”

“Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue green shoots and the plant called "audacity", which poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. ... I will do anything to escape boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.”

“fr. 2All We as Leaves He (following Homer) compares man's life with the leaves.All we as leaves in the shock of it: spring-one dull gold bounce and you're there. You see the sun? - I built that.As a lad. The Fates lashing their tails in a corner. But (let me think) wasn't it a hotel in Chicago where I had the first of those - my body walking out of the room bent on some deadly errandand me up on the ceiling just sort of fading out- brainsex paintings I used to call them?In the days when I (so to speak) painted. Rememberthat oddly wonderful chocolate we got in East (as it was then) Berlin?”

“M: ... but everytime I start in everytime I everytime you see I would have to tell the whole story all over again or else lie so I lie I just lie who are they who are the storytellers who can put an end to stories”

“M: Is he smartI: She yes very smart sees right through meM: In my day we valued blindness rather more”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Who does not end up a female impersonator?”

“LIII.What is the holiness of conversation? It isto master death.”

“What would it be liketo live in a libraryof melted books.With sentences streaming over the floorand all the punctuationsettled to the bottom as a residue.It would be confusing.Unforgivable.A great adventure.”

“It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.”

“He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.”

“Hegel on sacrifice. The animal dies. The man becomes alert.”

“God's pity! How long will it feel like burning?”

“Outside, the natural world was enjoying a moment of total strength.”

“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...”

“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.All mortals owe a debt to death.There's no one alivewho 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 one sweet goddess.You can let the rest go. Am I making sense?I think so. How about a drink.Put on a garland. I'm surethe happy splash of wine will cure your mood.We're all mortal you know. Think mortal.Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life,it's just catastrophe.”

“Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.”

“DEATH. . .And now you are here to fight for this woman.You know her promise is given.She has to die or her husband won't go free.APOLLORelax, I'm not breaking any laws.DEATHWhy the bow, if you're breaking no laws?APOLLOI always carry a bow, it's my trademark.”

“Now every mortal has painand 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 blankand all the rest just fantasy.”

“The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.”

“That tang of dogshit in darkness. That's your starry crown.”

“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.”

“...some hours later they were downat the railroad tracksstanding close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overheadscattering drops of itself.”

“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.”

“Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.”

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

“Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.”

“[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 let’s buy it what a bargain!”

“[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.”