A Quote by Anne Carson

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.
I like ornament at the right time, but I don't want a poem to be made out of decoration ... When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart-in all its forms-is endlessly available there. To experience ourselves in an important way just knocks me out. It puzzles me why people have given that up for cleverness. Some of them are ingenious, more ingenious than I am, but so many of them aren't any good at being alive.
I want to just go to places where writers don't usually go, where people like me don't usually show up, and say, 'Here are some poems. Do they speak to you? What do you hear in them?'
Far too many people believe that they are owed some kind of 'safe space' from opposing ideas, and the fact is, that just isn't true - and we shouldn't allow people to say that it is true without correcting them.
I'm used to always being different, in any context. People always want to know how I grew up, so I just say I grew up Muslim. That's the truth. Two Muslim girls can write me two extremely different letters - and they do. Some are very supportive, and some question what I do.
If you go on stage, or on TV, then there is an impetus that comes about to be a persona. A completely different character. But when you're someone like me, you don't want to have a persona. I want to be exactly who I am on stage.
Something can be symbolic without being a mere stand-in or vessel, which just brings us away from the true mystery and dread, into some boring version of what we already know. So what you say is true, in that the bear is a kind of parallel to the speaker, or imagined as such, but also very different. So if it's a symbol it is - ahem - a polysemous one.
Children in my family really look forward to Christmas presents and I enjoy becoming their Santa, eating chocolates, playing and spending some time with them. I also meet up with some of my close friends to have good food. That's all about Christmas for me.
Different presidents are different as far as their public persona vs. their persona meeting with advisers. For example, George Bush was pretty much the same in person as when he was speaking publicly. I think Donald Trump has a stage persona and he also has a temperament when meeting with his advisers. Now, the positions are the same, but the attitude is a little bit different.
My close proximity to many of the newsmakers can give me a different perspective about people in politics and what they might say than others who don't know them.
Why would anybody connect to someone who has everything going for them? It's the person who has faults that people want to connect to. So people identify with certain insecurities on stage and just by me talking about my diabetes people come up to me after the show and tell me "Gabe, my blood sugar is out of control and I feel you". That's the first thing they say, they say "I feel you!".
Sometimes people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic poem or something, and they say, "Oh, I really like your Zen poems." And I say, "Which ones are not Zen poems?"
It makes me hate accepting things that are probable when they are held up before me as infallibly true. I prefer these words which tone down and modify the hastiness of our propositions: "Perhaps, In some sort, Some, They say, I think," and the like.
All I can say about Juliette of the Herbs is that it has made me look at how my life is now, still close to the earth, but not close enough...I'm happy to have seen a glimpse into her life. It encourages me to live as radically as I want. Tish's film is a grand one.
I was brought up by a single mom in a poor town in Arkansas and while some aspects of small-town life were really positive - like the fact that everyone there is really sweet and hospitable - there is also this close-minded mentality, and that naturally made me want to rebel.
There are all of these people that say, my mommy doesn't love me enough, my daddy doesn't hug me enough. There are some people that would want to coddle them somewhere. I want them to shut up and stop whining.
You know, people see [August: Osage County], and I tell them that it's based on my family, and they assume that I came from some kind of horrible, hysterical circumstances. That's not true. My family, my nuclear family, was actually very close. My mom and dad were great parents and they encouraged a real rich, creative life for me and my brothers. My extended family, like every family, has some darkness, and some violence of some kind, emotional or otherwise, in their past.
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