Explore the wisdom in Anne Carson quotes. At PBC, we’ve curated some of her most profound reflections. Visit pennbookcenter.com for more insightful content.
Top Quotes by Anne Carson
“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”
“I began to understand that suffering and joy are not two different things, but the same thing, and I am not supposed to hate the bad things that happen.”
“To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.”
“For it is in our nature to endure through infinite transformations.”
“The fact that we don’t know this or that person has not kept us from a great deal of good, nor from some evil.”
“We want other people to have a feel for who we are, and we want them to feel the same things we feel.”
“We have art so that we shall not die of reality.”
“Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.”
“Desire is no light thing.”
“When you are in a train and it goes through a dark tunnel, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.”
“What is an author but the self projected.”
“The difference between a reality and a story is that life has no desire to answer the questions it poses.”
“There is no person without a world.”
“It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.”
“The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.”
“Grief and rage—you need a lot of both for grief to make sense.”
“The hardest thing about talking to other people is putting the same words to what we are feeling.”
“Who wants to understand the story of someone else’s pain?”
“To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.”
“I will not stop asking you why until you answer with a truth that hurts.”
“The dream doesn’t need to be explained; the dream must be lived.”
“The beauty of the world… has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
“There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.”
“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation.”
“What is a lover? One who waits.”
“There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.”
“The desire to go home that is a desire to be safe.”
“All translation is a compromise.”
“The words kept multiplying like flies on the windowpane. They must mean something.”
“The way that we see is a process of following the edges.”
Conclusion
We hope these Anne Carson quotes inspire you. Share your thoughts in the comments, spread the word, or dive deeper into our thought-provoking author quotes at pennbookcenter.com.
