"Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do."
"There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me."
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More quotes by Anne Carson
"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."
"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?"