Ben Lerner Quotes
I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

Quotes to Explore
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Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.
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Anything worth doing good takes a little chaos.
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Most pitchers fear losing their fastball, but since I don't have one, I have nothing to fear but fear itself.
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We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.
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I enjoy looking beyond the obvious and look at the stories happening all around me – you kind of formulate things in your mind and get excited about them.
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God says in the Quran that there is only one true religion, God's religion. It's the same theme that God revealed to all of the prophets, even before Muhammad.
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Ethical control may survive in small groups, but the control of the population as a whole must be delegated to specialists-to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies.
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Laughter always forgives.
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I hate to ask about the title, because it makes it seem like that is all I've read of the book.
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Forgiving's a choice you make—a gift you give to somebody even if they don't deserve it. It costs nothing, but it makes you feel rich for giving it away.
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Today, you have achieved something special, something only 92 percent of Americans your age will ever know: a college diploma. That’s right, with your college diploma you now have a crushing advantage over 8 percent of the workforce. I'm talking about dropout losers like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg.
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Those who don’t have a dream, it’s okay, it’s okay if you don’t have a dream. You just have to be happy.
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I have good looking kids. Thank goodness my wife cheats on me.
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I love the impatience of New York... You ever had somebody not ask you for directions, but demand them? You're just innocently walking down the street, you hear a horn, all of a sudden some guy's like, 'HOLLAND TUNNEL!!!' ...You know, like you were supposed to fax this guy directions. Suddenly, you're wasting HIS time.
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You can't expect to hit the jackpot if you don't put a few nickels in the machine.
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The nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices, which make decisions on the basis of decisions they made in the past.
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Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
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If you feel yourself to be above the mass, speak so as to raise the mass to the height of your argument.