"Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do."
"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."
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Source: Anne Carson (2009). “The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos”, p.43, Vintage
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"One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation."
"To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope."
"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."
"You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?"
"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."