Quotes from Autobiography of Red

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“Under the seams runs the pain.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. 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.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches.
Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt.
He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds.
I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“When they made love
Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back
as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down
from the base of the neck
to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“They were two superior eels
at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“Depression is one of the unknown modes of being.
There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity.
All language can register is the slow return
to oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape
and habit blurs perception and language
takes up its routine flourishes.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“Small, red, and upright he waited,
gripping his new bookbag tight
in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other,
while the first snows of winter
floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced
all trace of the world.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“...And tonight—Geryon? You okay?
Yes fine, I'm listening. Tonight—?
Why do you have your jacket over your head?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Can't hear you Geryon. The jacket shifted. Geryon peered out. I said sometimes
I need a little privacy.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“There is no person without a world.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“How does distance look?" is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“Not touching but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“Four of the roses were on fire.
They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets
and howling colossal intimacies
from the back of their fused throats.
- XXVII. MITWELT”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“...there it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“…..in that blurred state between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul. Like the terrestial crust of the earth which is proportionately 10 times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul is a miracle of mutual pressures. Millions of kilograms of force pounding up from earth’s core on the inside to meet the cold air of the world and stop as we do, just in time.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“Outside, the natural world was enjoying a moment of total strength.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“Geryon was a monster everything about him was red”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

“...some hours later they were down
at the railroad tracks
standing close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overhead
scattering drops of itself.”
― Anne Carson, quote from Autobiography of Red

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