Grief and rage--you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you--may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours. Anne Carson
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More Quotes By Anne Carson
  1. THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM[all snap flags] Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.

  2. LIII.What is the holiness of conversation? It isto master death.

  3. Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you. Have you given much thought to our mortal condition? Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen. There's no one alivewho can say if he will be tomorrow. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>Our fate moves invisibly! A...

  4. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

  5. Now every mortal has painand sweat is constant, but if there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me. We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth--we call it life. We know no other. The...

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