"There is no overstating the triumph of having remained motivated by beauty in taking down the ugliest of malignancies of human nature’s grasp for power. "

Maria Popova about Rachel Carson

"Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion."
from The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

"...a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding."

Anne Carson

"I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short, morphe in Greek means the the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can’t start writing something down until I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn’t say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is."

Anne Carson

"When the equilibrium of a self-regulating system is reminded of the slow death in which it is suspended, the motor may falter."
Anne Carson
from the Roni Horn project Wonderwater (Alice Offshore)

"a poet's medium is words positioned so as to lead you to the edge where words stop"
from Eros by Anne Carson