Anne Carson Quotes

I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.

This industry is too bonkers to understand. Every single part is completely different.

All you do is to look / At a page in this book / Because that's where we always will be. / No book ever ends / When it's full of your friends / The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.

We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

But what struck me was the book-madness of the place--books lay scattered across the unmade bed and the top of a battered-looking desk, books stood in knee-high piles on the floor, books were crammed sideways and right side up in a narrow bookcase that rose higher than my head and leaned dangerously from the wall, books sat in stacks on top of a dingy dresser. The closet door was propped open by a pile of books, and from beneath the bed a book stuck out beside the toe of a maroon slipper.

Do you know that if you take the books in an average school library and stretched out all those words into a single line, the line would go all the way around the world? Actually, I made that up, but doesn't it sound like it should be true?

The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.

The two things that constantly inspired me were books and travel.

With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, Confusion worse confounded.

Books are packaged dreams.

It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.

Creativity is born of chaos, even if it is somewhat difficult to glimpse the possibilities in the midst of the confusion.

Numbersign questionmark you" and "Asterisk exclamation point the world.

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

The rest, with very little exaggeration, was books. Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books. Tall cases lined three walls of the room, filled to and beyond capacity. The overflow had been piled in stacks on the floor. There was little space left for walking, and none whatever for pacing.

Complexity is not a cause of confusion. It is a result of it.

There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.

Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

Books" - Snell smiled - "are a kind of magic.

Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.

The words in this book are all phooey. When you say them, your lips will make slips and back flips and your tongue may end up in Saint Looey!

Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

Books belong to their readers.

It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.