Happy birthday, Anne Carson! 75, today! Here are some quotes from her writing:

“Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again.”

“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.”

“Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.”

“Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.”

“What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone else’s orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away. Part of what you enjoy in a documentary technique is the sense of banditry. To loot someone else’s life or sentences and make off with a point of view, which is called ‘objective’ because you can make anything into an object by treating it this way, is exciting and dangerous.”

“Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.”

“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 their difference. It is an erotic space.”

“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.”

“To feel anything
deranges you. To be seen
feeling anything strips you
naked. In the grip of it
pleasure or pain doesn’t
matter. You think what
will they do what new
power will they acquire if
they see me naked like
this. If they see you
feeling. You have no idea
what. It’s not about them.
To be seen is the penalty.”

“To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”

“What would it be like
to live in a library
of melted books.

With sentences streaming over the floor
and all the punctuation
settled to the bottom as a residue.

It would be confusing.
Unforgivable.
A great adventure.”

“Humans in love are terrible. You see them come hungering at one another like prehistoric wolves, you see something struggling for life in between them like a root or a soul and it flares for a moment, then they smash it. The difference between them smashes the bones out. So delicate the bones.”

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do. […] What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. […] Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.”

“Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.”

“One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.”

“Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”

“We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.”

“The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.”

“Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn’t a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project.”

“If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.”

“Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.”

“All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.”

“‘How does distance look?’ is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.”

“Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again.”

“We live by waters breaking out of the heart.”

“I don’t know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That’s where the mind moves, that’s what’s new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people’s heads for a long time. But the jumps between them are entirely at that moment. It’s magical.”

“All lovers believe they are inventing love.”

“We’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language, starting over with accuracy. I mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. Every accuracy has to be invented.”

“Silence is as important as words in the practice and study of translation. […] There are two kinds of silence that trouble a translator: physical silence and metaphysical silence. Physical silence happens when you are looking at, say, a poem of Sappho’s inscribed on a papyrus from two thousand years ago that has been torn in half. […] Metaphysical silence happens inside words themselves. And its intentions are harder to define. Every translator knows the point where one language cannot be translated into another. […] But now what if, within this silence, you discover a deeper one — a word that does not intend to be translatable. A word that stops itself.”

“There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.”

“Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty and then there follow all the consequences that lead to the end.”

“I don’t read reviews and I don’t know what to do with opinions, so I just lose them. They take up space, they become a process of manufacturing a persona, which I want to avoid.”

“After all, why study the past? Because you may wish to repeat it.”

“I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.”

“A translator is someone trying to get in between a body and its shadow. Translation is a task of imitation that faces in two directions at once.”