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Plainwater: Essays and Poetry QUOTES

Plainwater: Essays and Poetry QUOTES

1 " Pilgrims were people glad to take off their clothing, which was on fire. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

2 " On the Rules of Perspective
A bad trick. Mistake. Dishonesty. These are the views of Braque. Why? Braque rejected perspective. Why? Someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing that man has one eye, Braque felt. Braque wanted to take full possession of objects. He said as much in published interviews. Watching the small shiny planes of the landscape recede out of his grasp filled Braque with loss so he smashed them. Nature morte, said Braque. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

3 " We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

4 " 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. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

5 " Consider incompleteness as a verb. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

6 " 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. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

7 " Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue green shoots and the plant called "audacity", which poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. ... I will do anything to escape boredom. 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. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

8 " My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

9 " 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. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

10 " 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. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

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

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

12 " M: ... but everytime I start in everytime I everytime you see I would have to tell the whole story all over again or else lie so I lie I just lie who are they who are the storytellers who can put an end to stories "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

13 " What if you get stranded in the town where pears and winter are variants for one another? Can you eat winter? No. Can you live six months inside a frozen pear? No. But there is a place, I know the place, where you will stand and see pear and winter side by side as walls stand by in silence. Can you punctuate yourself as silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back into a world, of another kind-- back into real emptiness, some would say. Well, we are objects in a wind that stopped, is my view. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

14 " Gorge after gorge, turning, turning. Caverns of sunset, falling, falling away—just a single vast gold air breathed out by beings—they must have been marvelous beings, those gold-breathers. Down. Purple-and-green islands. Cleft and groined and gigantically pocked like something left behind after all the oceans vanished one huge night: the mountains. Their hills fold and fold again, fold away, down. Folded into the dens and rocks of the hills are ghost towns. Broken streets end in them, like a sound, nowhere. Shadow is inside. We walk (oh quietly) even so—breaking lines of force, someone’s. Houses stand in their stones. Each house an empty socket. Some streaked with red inside. Words once went on in there—no. I don’t believe that. Words never went on in there. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

15 " 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. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

16 " Now I think it is true to say of the road, and also of God, that it does not move. At the same time, it is everywhere. It has a language, but not one I know. It has a story, but I am in it. So are you. And to realize this is a moment of some sadness. When we are denied a story, a light goes off. I am asking you to study the dark. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

17 " The moon makes a traveler hunger for something bitter in the world, what is it? I will vanish; others will come here, what is that? An old question. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

18 " Order streamed from Noah in blue triangles and as the pure fury of his classifications rose around him, engulfing his life, they came to be called waves by others, who drowned, a world of them. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

19 " Your voice I know. It had me terrified. When I hear it in dreams, from time to time all my life, it sounds like a taunt—but dreams distort sound, for they send it over many waters. During these hard days, I, a pilgrim, am giving my consideration to this. I trudge along the bottom of the river and the questioning goes on in me. What are we made of but hunger and rage? His heels rise and fall in front of me. How surprised I am to be entangled in the knowledge of some other animal. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

20 " There are regular towns and irregular towns, there are wounded towns and sober towns and fiercely remembered towns, there are useless, but passionate towns that battle on, there are towns where the snow slides from the roofs of the houses with such force that victims are killed, but there are not empty towns (just empty scholars) and there is no regret. Now move along. "

― Anne Carson , Plainwater: Essays and Poetry