On Adjectives:
Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.
On being lost:
He did not gesticulate.
He did not knock on the glass. He waited. Small, red, and upright he waited,
gripping his new bookbag tight
in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other,
while the first snows of winter
floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced
all trace of the world
On a happy ending:
All over the world the beautiful red breezes went on blowing hand
in hand.
On love at first sight:
The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice.
On the look of distance:
“How does distance look?” is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless
within to the edge
of what can be loved. It depends on light.
On reality:
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
On people moving through time:
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that,
like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
On the noise that colours make:
He lay on his bed at night listening to the silver light of stars crashing against
the window screen.
On the dusk of winter:
It was the hour when snow goes blue
and streetlights come on and a hare
may pause on the tree line as still as a word in a book. In this hour he and his mother
accompanied each other. They did not
turn on the light but stood quiet and watched the night come washing up
towards them. Saw
it arrive, touch, move past them and it was gone. Her ash glowed in the dark.
On moods:
We would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods.
It is state-of-mind that discloses to us
(Heidegger claims) that we are beings who have been thrown into something else
Something else than what?
On depression:
Depression is one of the unknown modes of being.
There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity.
All language can register is the slow return
to the oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape
and habit blurs perception and language
takes up its routine flourishes.
On making love in the morning:
He was not
remembering how Herakles liked to make love early in the morning like a sleepy bear
taking the lid off a jar of honey…
On waiting:
Everyone seems to he waiting, said Geryon.Waiting for what? said Ancash.
Yes waiting for what, said Geryon.
On description:
What is the difference between a volcano and a guinea pig is not a description why is it like it is is a description.
[All quotes are from Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (1998)]