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Autobiography of Red

Anne Carson

Top 10 Best Quotes

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”

“Desire is no light thing.”

“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.”

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

“Under the seams runs the pain.”

“He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.”

“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.”

“A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.”

“They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.”

“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.”

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Book Keywords:

sound, reality, carson, words, language, writing, anne, movement, autobiography-of-red

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