Anne Carson Quotes

The first half of life is spent mainly in finding out who we are through seeing ourselves in our interaction with others.

I think people make their own faces, as they grow.

Did you ever wonder if the person in the picture is the same one you see when you look in the mirror?" - "That's the eternal question, isn't it? Are we born who we are, or do we make ourselves that way?

This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

No book can teach you about yourself, no psychologist, none of the professors or philosophers. What they can teach you is what they think you are or what they think you should be.

We spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function; it is what we do with our lives.

Self-definition and self-determination is about the many varied decisions that we make to compose and journey toward ourselves, about the audacity and strength to proclaim, create, and evolve into who we know ourselves to be. It’s okay if your personal definition is in a constant state of flux as you navigate the world.

I'm fascinated by what makes up a self, how one becomes a self, how much is it an answer to others and how much is it an essence of self. We learn how to be people from other people. Then you think - what's personal freedom? Is self-creation possible? This book is dedicated to a friend of mine who really did re-create herself. I didn't do that - I stayed in the circus and am a circus performer like my parents were. I did what I was raised to do - I'm glad I did but I'm fascinated by the people who managed to do something else. I was always very curious about other people.

If one sees the personality not as an apparatus that is essentially constructed by the time childhood is over, but as always in its essence developing, then life at 25 or 30 or at the gateway to middle age will stimulate its own intrigue, surprise, and exhilaration of discovery.

For after all we make our faces as we go along.

For me, it's a voyage of self-discovery. I'm able to go on a set and to explore situations, personalities, people and characters that are close to me, or maybe not. Through going there and experiencing these different people and their situations, it helps me to get oriented and develop as a human being. So, acting is fundamental to who I am.

It is through others that we become ourselves.

In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

We even make ourselves up, fusing what we are with what we wish into what we must become. I'm not sure why it must be so, but it is.

Part of teaching is helping people create themselves.

The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die.

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.

There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.

Every person is, in part, 'his own project' and makes himself.

In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.

The task we all face as human beings ... is to find and become who we are. The task teachers face is to find their own way of teaching, one that manifests who they are.

Culture is like wealth; it makes us more ourselves, it enables us to express ourselves

We are who we are because of who we were