Ben Lerner Quotes
-
I could imagine it in a way that felt like remembering.
-
I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds.
-
She said she hoped she would see me again, and the next thing I knew I was running through light snow back to my dorm, laughing aloud from an excess of joy like the schoolboy that I was. I had overwhelming sense of the world's possibility and plentitude; the massive, luminous spheres burned above me without irony; the streetlights were haloed and I could make out the bright, crustal highlands of the moon, the far-sprinkled systems; I was going to read everything and invent a new prosody and successfully court the radiant progeny of the vanguard doyens if it killed me; my mind and body were as a fading coal awakened to transitory brightness by her breath when she'd brushed her lips against me; the earth was beautiful beyond all change.
-
I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and put that under our eyes. So our faces were glowing - a kind of night vision.
-
I'm increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how there are all kinds of moments in our daily lives that break - or at least could break - from the logic of profit and the modes of domination it entails. Zones of freedom, even if it's never pure.
-
Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.
-
Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent.
-
How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?
-
But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability.
-
Maybe now if you're not an exhibitionist you're private. Or maybe it's just that for a lot of people - sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways - there's no division between the art object and what surrounds it.
-
The voices and laughter and birds and wind and traffic combined and separated gently.
-
The electorate, Adam had read in The Economist, would grow increasingly diverse and the Republicans would die off as a national party even if something remained the matter with Kansas.
-
Could come to terms with aspects of my past without those terms being set by the Foundation’s unexamined Freudian tradition, which pathologized women’s experience when it didn’t fit the great man’s theory.
-
And finally, an intern pushing the metal show box: see the cow, the purple of the hide barely perceptible, blood seeping from the small holes punched by a .22, ears tagged with plastic. Shitting itself, despite the tranquilizers, out of terror at being nearly real.
-
What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.
-
How much easier it would be if when you played them slowly in reverse the lyrics really did, as some hysterical parents feared, reveal satanic messages; if there were a backmasked secret order, however dark, instead of rage at emptiness.
-
The fatal problem with poetry: poems.
-
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.
-
I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.
-
Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
-
Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability" thing.
-
I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former.
-
I think I’d felt that as long as I avoided looking for the tickets, they would be there; it was only if I searched the archive that they’d disappear, as if the past were up until that point indeterminate, that I might outrun it. Do you know what I mean? We had to pay a lot of money to get the tickets for the next day; luckily they still had seats, although I suppose there are usually seats to and from Kansas City. It was kind of like that, recovering the memory of what my father had done. The knowledge was always there, I carried it in my body, but I didn’t know what I knew, although I knew I knew something and that I dreaded knowing it fully, dreaded it as if only coming into the knowledge, into the memory, would make the event that I was repressing real.
-
The real men—who are themselves in fact perpetual boys, since America is adolescence without end—had to differentiate themselves with violence.