Ben Lerner Quotes
Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical - the human world of violence and difference - and to reach the transcendent or divine. You’re moved to write a poem… But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented, but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.
Ben Lerner
Quotes to Explore
The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of exploitation and one of plunder. This is not, you know, necessarily about, you know, whether you're a good person or not or whether you see black people, you know, on the street, and you're willing to shake their hands and be polite.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
I taught English and history, so my education for that really helped prepare me for writing historical fiction.
Candace Camp
The history of philosophy is not, like the history of the sciences, to be studied with the intellect alone. That which is receptive in us and that which impinges upon us from history is the reality of man's being, unfolding itself in thought.
Karl Jaspers
I want to go down in history.
Haile Gebrselassie
Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?
Walt Whitman
Ambition is the immoderate desire for power.
Baruch Spinoza
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Karl Marx
Violence and chaos were an ever-present part of the world that I grew up in. And unfortunately, it wasn't just in my family. Sometimes, you'd see, you know, Mom fighting with one of her boyfriends. But a lot of times, you'd see people exploding on each other in a local restaurant or on the street.
J. D. Vance
I think there's this essential human desire to have a unified field theory. Everyone is like, 'I want to unlock the single secret to 'Lost.' There isn't any one secret. There is not a unified field theory for 'Lost,' nor do we think there should be, because philosophically, we don't buy into that as a conceit.
Carlton Cuse
If I was going to make a broad generalisation, I'd say that I prefer the company of women. People know now that I live with Mike Figgis, but I prefer not to talk about it. On one level, privacy is important, but on another level I have no desire to deny certain things.
Saffron Burrows
Every reality show plot pales in comparison to our history.
Rachel Skarsten
'Confederate,' in all of our minds, will be an alternative-history show. It's a science-fiction show. One of the strengths of science fiction is that it can show us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could, whether it were a historical drama or a contemporary drama.
D. B. Weiss
There comes a time in the life of every nation when it stands at the crossroads of history and must choose which way to go.
Lal Bahadur Shastri
Every coal miner I talked to had, in his history, at least one story of a cave-in. 'Yeah, he got covered up,' is a way coal miners refer to fathers and brothers and sons who got buried alive.
Jeanne Marie Laskas
There are lots of actors who are awful people, but nobody talks about them being awful because they've made billions.
Val Kilmer
Common sense will always prevail. America will advance the agenda for the greatest minds.
Safra A. Catz
I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.
Alan Bradley
Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical - the human world of violence and difference - and to reach the transcendent or divine. You’re moved to write a poem… But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented, but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.
Ben Lerner
