A Quote by Anne Carson

What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall. — © Anne Carson
What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
It's a hard life, but it's the only life we have. And sometimes-' he pointed to a bright flash of lightening, its jagged light stretching from the sky to the ground, '-it's still beautiful. Sometimes you find something that makes this all worth it. And when you do, you hang onto it for as long as you can.' He turned to me, shrugging one shoulder. 'That's the best you can do.
Spiritual life is like a moving sidewalk. Whether you go with it or spend your whole life running against it, you're still going to be taken along.
Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?
I can't become naked for everybody. It's never going to be possible for the person to write the whole story completely, so I find bits of myself, bits of what I think in some articles. And I don't give lip service to journalists. I never make them feel comfortable. I say, "It's your job to make the story."
People never change because they are under threat or under duress. Never. They change because they see something that makes their life seem valuable enough to start moving toward a life worth living.
The story of my recent life.' I like that phrase. It makes more sense than 'the story of my life', because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality- and in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.
Life is a series of adjustments; You can make changes along the way, but if you dodn't start moving forward you'll never get anywhere!
I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
The moral of human life is never simple, and the moral of a story which aims only at being true to human life cannot be expected to be any more so.
Standing still is never a good option. Not in the ring, and not in life... When you stop moving, you're done.
Life isn't perfect. It's not supposed to be. We all make mistakes. You bash your head against the wall and you get hurt, but you walk away and make the best of it. And that's what makes it life, Brenna, not perfection. You'll never find happiness if you only expect to find a perfect life. Happiness is something we reach for while we try to learn from our disappointments.
On some level, every story draws something from life experiences. Most of the time, it's just a matter of me pulling bits and pieces of my own past to help give characters or settings a little more life.
Do you ever get moods when life seems absolutely meaningless? It's like a badly-constructed story, with all sorts of characters moving in and out who have nothing to do with the plot. And when somebody comes along that you think really has something to do with the plot, he suddenly drops out. After a while you begin to wonder what the story is about, and you feel that it's about nothing—just a jumble.
Life. Unfair and painful at times. But always moving forward, always shifting,changing, with times relentless passage smoothing down jagged parts until it no longer hurts quite so much to breathe.
I think all writers are always collecting characters as we go along. Not just characters of course, we're collecting EVERYTHING. Bits and pieces of story. An interesting dynamic between people. A theme. A great character back story. A cool occupation. The look of someone's eyes. A burning ambition. Hundreds of thousands of bits of flotsam and jetsam that we stick in the back of our minds like the shelves full of buttons and ribbons and fabrics and threads and beads in a costumer's shop.
People need to understand that what happens in people's homes and behind closed doors, unless you were there, you really shouldn't make any analogy or any assumption, which writers do quite a bit. It's not something I ever for one second thought about. This is not my life story, and I've never told my life story, and I have no interest in telling my life story.
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