"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."

"Up against another human being one's own procedures take on definition."

"The instant of nature/forming between them drained every drop from the walls of his life/leaving behind just ghosts/rustling like an old map. He had nothing to say to anyone. He felt loose and shiny."

"'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."

"Up on the overpass/the night was wide open/and blowing headlights like a sea. He stood against the wind and let it peel him/clean."

"He stopped in a night suddenly gone solid./Who am I?"

"Reality is a sound, you have to tune into it not just keep yelling."

"Of course but that tells you nothing. Question is/how they use it-given/the limits of form."

"Geryon's life entered a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste."

"Geryon's/whole body formed one arch of a cry- upcast to that custom, the human custom/of wrong love."

"Staring at the vast black/and silver nonworld moving/and not moving incomprehensibly past this dangling fragment of humans/he felt its indifference roar over/his brain box."

"A man moves through time. It means nothing except that,/like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive."

"I want to study the erotics/of doubt.../...As a precondition.../../of the proper search for truth. Provided you can renounce...that/rather fundamental human trait/...the desire to know."

"I see the terrifying/spaces of the universe hemming me in..."

"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."

"So blank and/so bizarre would be/the human life that tried to live outside belief in belief."

"At what point does one say of a man/that he has become unreal?"

"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."

"To deny the existence of red/is to deny the existence of mystery. The soul who does so will one day go mad."

"Depression is one of the unknown modes of being./There are now 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."

"The Richter scale has neither a minimum nor a maximum threshold./Everything depends on/the sensitivity of the seismograph."

"In the space between them/developed a dangerous cloud./Geryon knew he must not go back into the cloud. Desire is no light thing."

"Raising a camera to one's face has effects/no one can calculate in advance."

"Enormous pools of the moment kept opening around his hands/each time he tried to move them."

"We are amazing beings,/Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire./And now time is rushing towards them/where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,/night at their back."

from Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson