Anne Carson Quotes

It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.

When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should 'teach writing,' which I have no idea how to do and don't really believe in.

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.

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

What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.

A 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.

Under the seams runs the pain.

I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they're both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that's almost happening, never quite totally happening.

You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.