Anne Carson Quotes

I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.

Sometimes I feel my whole life has been one big rejection.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

My character in 'La Haine,' he's not bad; he's unhappy, and usually, people are like that. Most of us are angry.

I kind of crave loneliness.

I think I was kind of melancholy as a kid. I spent a lot of time inside my own head, a lot of time sort of staring into space wondering the hell was going on.

My private life's quite sad.

Me writing 'Black Rainbow' was me alone in a windowless room going insane.

I'm always sad.

The difference between guilt and shame is very clear--in theory. We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are. A person feels guilt because he did something wrong. A person feels shame because he is something wrong. We may feel guilty because we lied to our mother. We may feel shame because we are not the person our mother wanted us to be.

I lay in bed at night crying to myself. The only one who loved me and watched over me was someone I couldn't see or hear or touch.

The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.

One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.

My greatest affliction... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights.

I was hurrying through my own soul . . . I was leaning out . . . I was listening.

In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.

Lonely is the night when you find yourself alone.

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

She wants to go home, but nobody's home. That's why she lies, broken inside. With no place to go, no place to go, to dry her eyes, broken inside.

I Know, I Alone I know, I alone How much it hurts, this heart With no faith nor law Nor melody nor thought. Only I, only I And none of this can I say Because feeling is like the sky - Seen, nothing in it to see.

I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented.

Each night I lie down in a graveyard of memories. Moonlight spins a shroud about me.

Dear God, Tatiana prayed in bed that night, turning to the wall and pulling the white sheet and the thin brown blanket over herself. If You are there somewhere, please teach me how to hide what I never knew how to show.

One man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to loose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison for you.

She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.