Ben Lerner Quotes

I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.

Ben Lerner

• Faith
• Government
• Language
• Imagine
• Poems
• Art-works

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Quotes to Explore

• I don't really measure success by anything other than if I am happy. That is success to me. Am I happy waking up every morning? And despite the challenges of running my own business, do I look forward to going to work? Absolutely.

  

  L'Wren Scott
  • Up
  • Work
  • Business

• I swear allegiance to the Republic of Sudan.

  

  Salva Kiir Mayardit
  • Swear
  • Republic
  • Sudan

• I received my parents' permission and went into the Navy on June 3, 1941.

  

  Jack Adams
  • Parents
  • June
  • Navy

• Conspiracies, since they cannot be engaged in without the fellowship of others, are for that reason most perilous; for as most men are either fools or knaves, we run excessive risk in making such folk our companions.

  

  Francesco Guicciardini
  • Men
  • Risk
  • Run

• The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God.

  

  T. E. Lawrence
  • God
  • Look
  • Him

• I wanted to identify that the black experience is American experience.

  

  Wadada Leo Smith
  • Experience
  • American
  • Black

• The army should go back to their assigned duties, and police should take the responsibility of fighting the cartels.

  

  Vicente Fox
  • Responsibility
  • Fighting
  • Army

• Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.

  

  Samuel Butler
  • Fall
  • Impossible
  • Compromise

• I think when you compete every week, when you play under pressure daily, you find your rituals to be 100 percent focused on what you're doing.

  

  Rafael Nadal
  • Daily
  • Week
  • Pressure

• If you think about it, a lot of great horror films have bad sequels just because the market demands you to make the other one right away. Thank God no one in the 'Evil Dead' family thinks that way.

  

  Fede Alvarez
  • Great
  • God
  • Family

• I'm a genuine person - I will never promote something I don't believe in.

  

  Gal Gadot
  • Believe
  • Person
  • Genuine

• The chemistry that you get from living with your band and creating music and recording with your band translates to the stage.

  

  Zac Brown Band
  • Music
  • You
  • Band

• Great men always pay deference to greater.

  

  Walter Savage Landor
  • Great
  • Men
  • Great Men

• Stay true to your own voice, and don't worry about needing to be liked or what anybody else thinks. Keep your eyes on your own paper.

  

  Laura Dern
  • True
  • Eyes
  • Worry

• We live in a globalising world. That means that all of us, consciously or not, depend on each other. Whatever we do or refrain from doing affects the lives of people who live in places we'll never visit.

  

  Zygmunt Bauman
  • People
  • World
  • Live

• I feel like people are funny, and women are people, so I'm sick of the distinction.

  

  Kate Flannery
  • People
  • Women
  • Funny

• I never had little brothers, so I was totally not used to hearing a lot of cussing at a young age! I learned what 'pull my finger' meant the hard way.

  

  Danica McKellar
  • Age
  • Never
  • Young

• If you buy the Chromebook Plus and intend to use it mainly as a Chromebook, I expect you'll have a good experience. But if you plan to rely heavily on Android apps, you're basically buying into the start of a journey, replete with odd-looking presentations of familiar apps, bugs and crashes.

  

  Walt Mossberg
  • Good
  • Experience
  • Journey

• It's great living with your best friends.

  

  Cameron Dallas
  • Great
  • Friends
  • Best

• Unchallenged, opinions became respected precedent then exceptionless concepts and sometimes even civil and academically accepted social law.

  

  R. Buckminster Fuller
  • Law

• My hand is entirely the implement of a distant sphere. It is not my head that functions but something else, something higher, something somewhere remote. I must have great friends there, dark as well as bright. They are all very kind to me.

  

  Paul Klee
  • Hand
  • Functions
  • Remote

• If you do an autopsy on an 85-year-old who died of a stroke, you will find five other things that person was about to die from.

  

  S. Jay Olshansky
  • You
  • Die
  • Find

• After 2003, we lowered taxes across the board. And by 2004, revenue to the federal government grew. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan cut taxes dramatically. And by the end of the decade, revenue coming in the federal government had doubled.

  

  Pat Toomey
  • Government
  • End
  • Taxes

• I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.

  

  Ben Lerner
  • Faith
  • Government
  • Language