It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the tendency for narratives of conflict to overshadow those of connection and unity.
Anne Carson's quote reflects on the common human inclination to focus on stories of pain and discord, often neglecting the deeper, more profound stories of love, connection, and the bonds that unite us. It suggests a critical perspective on how narratives shape our understanding of relationships, pointing out that healing and togetherness are frequently overlooked in favor of more dramatic tales of separation and hurt.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of community, one might use this quote to illustrate how stories of connection are often underrepresented.
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.
[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.
Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. Itβs usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
Whoever is in the distress can call me. I will come running wherever they are.
Once the love bug wears off, as it inevitably does, you are shocked to discover that you really didn't know the object of your affections at all. We know this to be so, even as we repeat the same mistake over and over and over.
Don't ever play with someone's feelings, you could win the game but you could lose that person forever.
If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
Marriage is an effort to legalize love. It is out of fear. It is thinking about the future, about the tomorrows. Man always thinks of the past and the future, and because of this constant thinking about past and future, he destroys the present. And the present is the only reality there is. One has to live in the present. The past has to die and has to be allowed to die.
My wife was the first romantic partner who understood both American and native parts of me - not so much the positive stuff, but the damage.
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