Glass, Irony and God Quotes

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

“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.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that?

And I said,
Where do I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass and God

“Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“...I am talking about evil.

It blooms.
It eats.
It grins.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.

I can feel that other day running underneath this one
like an old videotape”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Where does unbelief begin?
When I was young

there were degrees of certainty.
I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands.
Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands
occasionally disappear–”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Aristotle tells us that the high-pitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices…. High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control. Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable…. Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death…. Woman is that creature who puts the inside on the outside. By projections and leakages of all kinds—somatic, vocal, emotional, sexual—females expose or expend what should be kept in…. [As Plutarch comments,] “…she should as modestly guard against exposing her voice to outsiders as she would guard against stripping off her clothes. For in her voice as she is blabbering away can be read her emotions, her character and her physical condition.”… Every sound we make is a bit of autobiography. It has a totally private interior yet its trajectory is public. A piece of inside projected to the outside. The censorship of such projections is a task of patriarchal culture that (as we have seen) divides humanity into two species: those who can censor themselves and those who cannot…. It is an axiom of ancient Greek and Roman medical theory and anatomical discussion that a woman has two mouths. The orifice through which vocal activity takes place and the orifice through which sexual activity takes place are both denoted by the wordstoma in Greek (os in Latin) with the addition of adverbs ano and kato to differentiate upper mouth from lower mouth. Both the vocal and the genital mouth are connected to the body by the neck (auchen in Greek, cervix in Latin). Both mouths provide access to a hollow cavity which is guarded by lips that are best kept closed.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“It is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now.
This is not uncommon after loss of love—

blue and black and red blasting the crater open.
I am interested in anger.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Banal sexism aside,
I find myself tempted

to read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revenge
for all that life withheld from Emily.
But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation.

As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women.
It is a chilly thought.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“She said,
When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?
Why keep watching? Why not go away? I was amazed.
Go away where? I said.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“There is a loneliness that fills the plain.
Total.
Lunar.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Where does unbelief begin? / When I was young // there were degrees of certainty. / I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands. / Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands / occasionally disappear–”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
She shifted to a question about airports.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to bed at night.

I open mine as wide as possible.
I like to see everything, I say.
What’s there to see?

Moon. Air. Sunrise.
All that light on your face in the morning. Wakes you up.
I like to wake up.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“I had not been in love before.
It was like a wheel rolling downhill.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“A thousand questions hit my eyes from the inside.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“So about an hour later we are in the taxi
shooting along empty country roads towards town.
The April light is clear as an alarm.

As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object
existing in space on its own shadow.
I wish I could carry this clarity with me

into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce.
I wish I had been nicer to him before he got crazy.
These are my two wishes.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Her marble tears run down her marble face.
A stranger is someone who has no handkerchief.

Who has no words to say.

Whose shadow mind is burning
as he sits watching her hands
and thinks how rare!

to see a Roman
talk
with no gestures at all.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Unsociable even at home

and unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out,
Emily made her awkward way
across days and years whose bareness appalls her biographers.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“… in between the neighbour who recalls her
coming in from a walk on the moors
with her face “lit up by a divine light”

and the sister who tells us
Emily never made a friend in her life,
is a space where the little raw soul

slips through.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“… his voice saying,
You beauty. I can feel that beauty’s

heart beating inside mine as she presses into his arms in the high blue
room–”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Not passion but compassion.
Com—means "with."
What kind of withness would that be?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Emily is in the parlour brushing the carpet,”
records Charlotte in 1828.
Unsociable even at home”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Isaiah go home and get some sleep, said God.

Isaiah went home, slept, woke again.

Isaiah felt a sensation below the neck, it was a silk and bitter sensation.

Isaiah looked down.

It was milk forcing the nipples open.

Isaiah was more than whole.

I am not with you am in you, said the muffled white voice of God.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“The basic rules of male-female relations
were imparted atmospherically in our family,

no direct speech allowed.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“It is very cold
walking into the long scraped April wind.
At this time of the year there is no sunset
just some movements inside the light and then as sinking away.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“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.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“I stopped watching.
I forgot about Nudes.
I lived my life,

which felt like a switched-off TV.
Something had gone through me and out and I could not own it.”
― Anne Carson, Glass and God