Quotations

"Take some more tea, the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
I've had nothing yet, Alice replied in an offended tone, so I can't take more.
You mean you can't take less, said the Hatter: it's very easy to take more than nothing.
Nobody asked your opinion, said Alice."

— Lewis Carroll, English author, born 1832

"I had always been aware that the Universe is sad; everything in it, animate or inanimate, the wild creatures, the stones, the stars, was enveloped in the great sadness, pervaded by it. Existence had no use.
It was without end or reason. The most beautiful things in it, a flower or a song, as well as the most compelling, a desire or a thought, were pointless. So great a sorrow. And I knew that the only rest from my anxiety—for I had been trembling even in infancy—lay in acknowledging and absorbing this sadness."

— Hayden Carruth, American poet, born 1921

"The eye has knowledge the mind cannot share."

— Hayden Carruth, American poet, born 1921

"As Socrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you."

— Anne Carson, Canadian poet, born 1950

"What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. 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."

— Anne Carson, Canadian poet, born 1950

"Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can."

— Anne Carson, Canadian poet, born 1950

"What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away."

— Anne Carson, Canadian poet, born 1950

"You can gain reconciliation from your enemies, but you can only gain peace from yourself."

— Rubin Carter, American-Canadian boxer, born 1937

"If you love it enough, anything will talk to you."

— George Washington Carver, American inventor, born c. 1864

"No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it."

— George Washington Carver, American inventor, born c. 1864

"You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?"

— Raymond Carver, American poet, born 1938

"It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power."

— Raymond Carver, American poet, born 1938

"Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them."

— Raymond Carver, American poet, born 1938

"I have this dream life where I get to be a celebrity but I get to navigate the world fairly easily because I'm always in character."

— Dana Carvey, American comedian, born 1955