01UndatedCome 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, lAnne Carson / quote ↗
02Undatedperhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poemfrom the last years of her life that begins"I lose my screams"dear Antigone,I take it as the task of the translatorto forbid that you should ever lose your screamsAnne Carson / quote ↗
03Undated...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.Anne Carson / quote ↗
04UndatedWhen an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets describe this struggle from within a consciousness – perhaps new in the world – of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability.Anne Carson / quote ↗
05UndatedThe story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how the 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 / quote ↗
06UndatedPilgrims were people glad to take off their clothing, which was on fire.Anne Carson / quote ↗
08UndatedA 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.Anne Carson / quote ↗
09UndatedSmall, red, and upright he waited,gripping his new bookbag tightin one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other,while the first snows of winterfloated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silencedall trace of the world.Anne Carson / quote ↗
10UndatedShe stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?Anne Carson / quote ↗
14UndatedOn the Rules of PerspectiveA bad trick. Mistake. Dishonesty. These are the views of Braque. Why? Braque rejected perspective. Why? Someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing that man has one eye, Braque felt. Braque wanted to take full possession of objects. He said as much in published interviews. Watching the small shiny planes of the landscape recede out of his grasp filled Braque with loss so he smashed them. Nature morte, said Braque.Anne Carson / quote ↗
16UndatedAre there many little boys who think they are a Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded himJoyfullyAnne Carson / quote ↗
17UndatedTo be a prophet, Knox emphasizes, requires living in and looking at the present, at what is really going on around you.Anne Carson / quote ↗
18UndatedDEATH. . .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.Anne Carson / quote ↗
19UndatedYou 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.Anne Carson / quote ↗
20UndatedMadness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.Anne Carson / quote ↗
21UndatedBlessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floorand all your thrashed coasts groanAnne Carson / quote ↗
22UndatedThere 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.Anne Carson / quote ↗
24UndatedAnd the reason he cannot bear her dying is not the loss of her (which is the future) but that dying puts the two of them (now) into this nakedness together that is unforgivable.Anne Carson / quote ↗
