Anne Carson Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.All mortals owe a debt to death.There's no one alivewho can say if he will be tomorrow.Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery.No one can teach it, no one can grasp it.Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink!But don't forget Aphrodite--that's one sweet goddess.You can let the rest go. Am I making sense?I think so. How about a drink.Put on a garland. I'm surethe happy splash of wine will cure your mood.We're all mortal you know. Think mortal.Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life,it's just catastrophe. Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

2. [Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.

3. [Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let’s buy it what a bargain! Short Talks

4. Aristotle thought earthquakes were causedby winds trapped in subterranean caves. We’re more scientific now, we knowit’s just five guys fracking the fuck out of the world while it’s still legal. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy

5. 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. Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

6. Girls are cruelest to themselves.Someone like Emily Brontë,who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman,had cruelty drifted up in all the cracks of her like spring snow. Glass, Irony and God

7. Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go. Decreation

8. My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘life and no escape. Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

9. Not passion but compassion.Com—means "with."What kind of withness would that be? Glass, Irony and God

10. Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate... Nox

11. That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attemptedalthough married six months.Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not surewe got it right.He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.Early next dayI wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had publishedin a small quarterly magazine.Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.Or should I say ideal.Neither of us had ever seen Venice.

12. THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM[all snap flags]Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem. Decreation

13. Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual. Eros the Bittersweet

14. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope. Eros the Bittersweet

15. You remember too much,my mother said to me recently.Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down? Glass, Irony and God