anne carson bot

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

Eros […] acts out of a love of paradox, that is as he folds the beloved object out of sight into a mystery, into a blind point where it can float known and unknown, actual and possible, near and far, desired and drawing you on.

I want you to be free. 

Don’t want to be free want to be with you.

Not touching 
but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.

God had the book of life open at PLEASURE and was holding the pages down in one hand because of the wind from the door.
For I made their flesh as a sieve
wrote God at the top of the page and then listed in order:

Alcohol
Blood
Gratitude
Memory
Semen
Song
Tears
Time.

Love dares the self to leave itself behind
[to enter into poverty

the word 'mute' is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing to be seen hiding.

How does distance look? is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless 
within to the edge 
of what can be loved.

O amor é como ficar louco. A gente pensa que vai morrer, mas não, a gente tem que suportar tudo, queimar até a alma e continuar vivendo. O amor é morrer e renascer a cada instante, é se transformar, é nunca mais voltar a ser o mesmo.

When you are in love the greatest certainty is felt about the beloved as necessary complement to you. Your powers of imagination calling up possibilities from beyond the actual. All at once a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one, is coming into focus.

Desire, then, is neither inhabitant nor ally of the desirer. Foreign to her will, it forces itself irresistibly upon her from without.

The moment when the soul parts on itself in desire is conceived as a dilemma of body and senses.

Something paradoxical arrests the lover. Arrest occurs at a point of inconcinnity between the actual and the possible, a blind point where the reality of what we are disappears into the possibility of what we could be if we were other than we are. But we are not.

He looked out at the world, the most famous experimental prison of its time. Beyond the torture stakes he could see, nothing. Yet he could see.

I want to know who you are. People talk about a voice calling in the wilderness. All through the Old Testament a voice, which is not the voice of God but which knows what is on God’s mind, is crying out. While I am waiting, you could do me a favour. Who are you?

Is it true you think about sex every day?

The beginning is not fictive. It cannot be placed in the control of a writer or reader. We should note that the Greek verb ‘to read’ is anagignōskein, a compound of the verb ‘to know’ (gignōskein) and the prefix ana, meaning ‘again.’ If you are reading, you are not at the beginning.

As lover you reach forward to a point in time called ‘then’ when you will bite into the long-desired apple. Meanwhile you are aware that as soon as ‘then’ supervenes upon ‘now,’ the bittersweet moment, which is your desire, will be gone. You cannot want that, and yet you do.

The suffering of love does not arise out of any action, but only from the cogitation of the mind upon what it sees does that suffering issue.

To desire and be desired, what could be simpler? A woman cannot tell a simple story.

As syntax, it impressed us as something of a subterfuge: properly a noun, eros acts everywhere like a verb. Its action is to reach, and the reach of desire involves every lover in an activity of the imagination.

On the surface of it, the lover wants the beloved. This, of course, is not really the case.
Union would be annihilating.
What the lover needs is to be able to face the beloved and yet not be destroyed.

Lovers float in that “pure portion of anxiety,” the present indicative of desire. They are astonished when they fall in love, they are equally astonished when they fall out of love.

The lover helplessly admits that it feels both good and bad to be mixed up, but is then driven back upon the question ‘Once I have been mixed up in this way, who am I?’ Desire changes the lover. The change gives him a glimpse of a self he never knew before.

Across this space a spark of eros moves in the lover’s mind to activate delight. Delight is a movement (kinēsis) of the soul, in Aristotle’s definition (Rh. 1.1369b19). No difference: no movement. No Eros.

A gift has both economic and spiritual content, is personal and reciprocal, and depends on a relationship that endures over time. Money is an abstraction that passes one way and impersonally between people whose relationship stops with the transfer of cash.

Letters are the mechanism of erotic paradox, at once connective and separative, painful and sweet.
[…]
Letters project the ideal on a screen of the actual. From within letters, Eros acts.

God’s gift is simply random […] God’s choice can be seen emergingfrom the dark side of reason.

To create pleasure and pain at once is the novelist’s aim.

Odi et amo ergo sum.