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Anne Carson

Anne Carson Quotes

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Famous Anne Carson Quotes

“Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else. 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. The marks construct an instant of nature gradually, without the boredom of a story. I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid 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.”

PoetryKnowingBoredom
Book:Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
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“So about an hour later we are in the taxi shooting along empty country roads towards town. The April light is clear as an alarm. As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object existing in space on its own shadow. I wish I could carry this clarity with me into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce. I wish I had been nicer to him before he got crazy. These are my two wishes.”

ChildrenPoetryPoemIllnessClarityParentsDementiaAlzheimers
Book:Glass, Irony and God
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“[Ibykos fr. 286 translated using only words from p. 47 of Endgame by Samuel Beckett] In your kitchen, on the one hand, bright corpses starting to stink of having an idea, where one of my legs [is] and beneath sooner or later the whole universe doesn't ring and won't work. On the other hand, I shouldn't think so. Nay Rather, like a speck in the void, pacing to and fro, accompanied by the alarm, frankly, angrily, impatiently, not very convinced, [it] kisses me goodbye. I'm dead. (Pause).”

PoetryEndgameBeckettAnne CarsonNay Rather
Author:Anne Carson
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