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, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. 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. ~ Ben Lerner

I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former ~ Ben Lerner

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. ~ Ben Lerner

If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak. ~ Ben Lerner

I could imagine it in a way that felt like remembering ~ Ben Lerner

I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts - all these things have to be harnessed by the political. The libidinal has to be harnessed by the political. ~ Ben Lerner

Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem - no such thing - a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean. ~ Ben Lerner

I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American. ~ Ben Lerner

And if we never slept together or otherwise 'realized' our relationship, I would leave Spain with this gorgeous possibility intact, and in my memory could always ponder the relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive. ~ Ben Lerner

I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness. ~ Ben Lerner

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. ~ Ben Lerner

I don't want what we're doing to just end up as notes for a novel. ~ Ben Lerner

I turned off the projector and Alex mumbled something in her sleep and turned over. I said, "Everything is fine, I'm going home now," and said it just so I could say I'd said it in case she was upset later that I'd left without telling her. I thought about kissing her on the forehead but rejected the idea immediately; whatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm; even that relatively avuncular gesture would be strange for both of us now. More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Alex, just like the sociability with strangers or the aura around objects, wasn't just over, but retrospectively erased. Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they'd faded from the photograph. ~ Ben Lerner

Nothing is a cliche when you're living it. ~ Ben Lerner

Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside. ~ Ben Lerner

I don't think "I'm going to publish this as fiction" but I think "I'm going to tell this story to a friend" and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it's already happened. ~ Ben Lerner

That part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn't obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading. ~ Ben Lerner

Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms. ~ Ben Lerner

I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value. ~ Ben Lerner

She chose you for your deficiencies, not in spite of them, a new kind of mating strategy for millennial women whose priority is keeping the more disastrous fathers away, not establishing a nuclear family. ~ Ben Lerner

The fatal problem with poetry: poems. ~ Ben Lerner

Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads. ~ Ben Lerner

Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity. ~ Ben Lerner

When she reached me she asked gently if I were O.K., what was bothering me. Fine, nothing, I said, but in a way I hoped confirmed incommunicable depths had opened up inside me. ~ Ben Lerner

Then he imagined his narrator standing before it, imagined that the gaslight cut across worlds and not just years, that the author and the narrator, while they couldn't face each other, could intuit each other's presence by facing the same light, a kind of correspondence. ~ Ben Lerner

Tonight I see no spheres, but project myself
and gaze back, an important trick
because the goal is to be on both sides of the poem,
shuttling between the you and I. ~ Ben Lerner

Happy were the ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, ages of such perfect social integration that no drug was required to link the hero to the whole. ~ Ben Lerner

And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet, your interlocutors will often ask: A PUBLISHED Poet? And when you tell them that you are, indeed, a published poet, they seem at least vaguely impressed. Why is that? Its not like they or anybody they know reads poetry journals. And yet there is something deeply right, I think, about this knee-jerk appeal to publicity. It's as if to say: Everybody can write a poem, but has your poetry, the distillation of your innermost being, been found authentic and intelligible by others? Can it circulate among persons, make of its readership, however small, a People in that sense? This accounts for the otherwise bafflingly persistent association of Poetry and fame - baffling since no poets are famous among the general population. To demand proof of fame is to demand proof that your songs made it back intact from the dream in the stable to the social world of the fire, that your song is at once utterly specific to you and exemplary for others. ~ Ben Lerner

I would like to say that, as the protester finished his shower, I was disturbed by the contradiction between my avowed political materialism and my inexperience with this brand of making, of poeisis, but I could dodge or dampen that contradiction via my hatred of Brooklyn's boutique biopolitics, in which spending obscene sums and endless hours on stylized food preparation somehow enabled the conflation of self-care and political radicalism. ~ Ben Lerner

I'm going to kill the president.
I promise. I surrender. I'm sorry.
I'm gay. I'm pregnant. I'm dying.
I'm not your father. You're fired.
Fire. I forgot your birthday.
You will have to lose the leg.
She was asking for it.
It ran right under the car.
It looked like a gun. It's contagious.
She's with God now.
Help me. I don't have a problem.
I've swallowed a bottle of aspirin.
I'm a doctor. I'm leaving you.
I love you. Fuck you. I'll change. ~ Ben Lerner

The most common criticism of the spread was that it detached policy debate from the real world, that nobody used language the way that these debaters did, save perhaps for auctioneers. But even adolescents knew this wasn't true, that corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time: for they heard the spoken warnings at the end of the increasingly common television commercials for prescription drugs, when risk information was disclosed at a speed designed to make it difficult to comprehend; they heard the list of rules and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of promotions on the radio; they were at least vaguely familiar with the 'fine print' one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with these thousands of words was comprehend them. These types of disclosure were designed to conceal; they exposed you to information that, should you challenge the institution in question, would be treated like a 'dropped argument' in a fast round of debate - you have already conceded the validity of the point by failing to address it when it was presented. It's no excuse that you didn't have the time. Even before the twenty-four hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting 'spread' in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies. ~ Ben Lerner

On various occasions I'd said to a woman I was interested in, "I would invite you to dinner, but I can't cook," at which point I would hope she'd say, "I'm a great cook," so I could ask her to come over and teach me; then we'd get drunk in the kitchen while I displayed what I hoped was my endearing clumsiness, never learning anything. ~ Ben Lerner

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. ~ Ben Lerner

You are the first and last indigenous Nintendo. ~ Ben Lerner

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. ~ Ben Lerner

Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me. ~ Ben Lerner

I'll project myself into several futures simultaneously," I should have said, "a minor tremor in my hand; I'll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid. ~ Ben Lerner

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre. ~ Ben Lerner

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another. ~ Ben Lerner

I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens. ~ Ben Lerner

Poetry: What kind of art assumes the dislike of its audience and what kind of artist aligns herself with that dislike, even encourages it? An art hated from without and within. ~ Ben Lerner

The scare quotes burn off like fog. ~ Ben Lerner

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for. ~ Ben Lerner

Why reproduce if you believe the world is ending?
Because the world is always ending for each of us and if one begins to withdraw from the possibilities of experience, then no one would take any of the risks involved with love. ~ Ben Lerner

The voices and laughter and birds and wind and traffic combined and separated gently. ~ Ben Lerner

How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me? ~ Ben Lerner

Who wasn't squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said "I"; who wasn't a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life? ~ Ben Lerner

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. ~ Ben Lerner

I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms. ~ Ben Lerner

When I was a kid and we played baseball we used to use that "eye black" stuff sometimes - that kind of grease you put under your eyes to reduce glare or something. We only used it, of course, to look cool; it's not like we were any better prepubescent athletes for reducing glare. ~ Ben Lerner

Your interviews or blog posts or whatever are less supplements to your novel than part of it. I'm not private, but I believe in literary form - I'll use my life as material for art (I don't know how not to do this) and I'll use art as a way of exploring that passage of life into art and vice versa, but that's not the same thing as thinking that any of the details of my life are interesting or relevant on their own. ~ Ben Lerner

Mad Lib Elegy"

There are starving children left on your plate.
There are injuries without brains.
Migrant workers spend 23 hours a day
removing tiny seeds from mixtures
they cannot afford to smoke
and cannot afford not to smoke.
Entire nations are ignorant of the basic facts
of hair removal and therefore resent
our efforts to depilate unsightly problem areas.
Imprisonment increases life expectancy.
Finish your children. Adopt an injury.
'I'm going to my car. When I get back,
I'm shooting everybody.'
[line omitted in memory of_______]


70% of pound animals will be euthanized.
94% of pound animals would be euthanized
if given the choice. The mind may be trained
to relieve itself on paper. A pill
for your safety, a pill for her pleasure.
Neighbors are bothered by loud laughter
but not by loud weeping.
Massively multiplayer zombie-infection web-games
are all the rage among lifers.
The world is a rare case of selective asymmetry.
The capitol is redolent of burnt monk.
'I'm going to my car. When I get back
I'm shooting everybody.'
[line omitted in memory of _______]


There are two kinds of people in the world:
those that condemn parking lots as monstrosities,
'the ruines of a broken World,' and those
that respond to their majesty emotionally.
70% of the planet is covered in parking lots ~ Ben Lerner

Since the world is ending," Peter quoted from behind us, "why not let the children touch the paintings? ~ Ben Lerner

[A] "poem" is understood as [something] referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures ~ Ben Lerner

Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation. ~ Ben Lerner

What normally felt like the only possible world became one among many ~ Ben Lerner

All I ask the haters
and I, too, am one
is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love. ~ Ben Lerner

Each member of this shadowy network resented the others, who were irritating reminders that nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is, and that their soft version of self-imposed exile was just another of late empire's packaged tours. ~ Ben Lerner

I imagined the passengers could see me, imagined I was a passenger that could see me looking up at myself looking down. ~ Ben Lerner

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity. ~ Ben Lerner

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels. ~ Ben Lerner

When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I'd memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium. ~ Ben Lerner

...no matter what any poet did, the poems would constitute screens on which readers could project their own desperate belief in the possibility of poetic experience, whatever that might be, or afford them the opportunity to mourn its impossibility. ~ Ben Lerner

I believe she imbued my body thus, finding every touch enhanced by ambiguity of intention, as if it too required translation, and so each touch branched out, became a variety of touches. ~ Ben Lerner

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. ~ Ben Lerner

Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others. ~ Ben Lerner

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context. ~ Ben Lerner

As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation: the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display. ~ Ben Lerner

The stars dehisce.
By "stars" I mean, of course, tradition,
and by "tradition" I mean nothing at all.
A pronoun disembowels his antecedent.
Stop me if you've heard this one before. ~ Ben Lerner

I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity. ~ Ben Lerner

Obama was the most powerful man in the world, but that didn't mean he could control the forces at play in the Middle East. There was no Nelson Mandela who could lead a country to absolution for its sins and ours. Extremist forces were exploiting the Arab Spring. Reactionary forces - with deep reservoirs of political support in the United States - were intent on clinging to power. Bashar al-Assad was going to fight to the death, backed by his Russian and Iranian sponsors. Factions were going to fight it out in the streets of Libya. The Saudis and Emiratis were going to stamp out political dissent in Egypt before it could come to their kingdoms. A Likud prime minister was going to mouth words about peace while building settlements that made peace impossible. Meanwhile, innocent people were going to suffer, some of them were going to be killed, and there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it. Obama had reached that conclusion before I had. History had opened up a doorway in 2011 that, by the middle of 2013, had been slammed shut. There would be more war, more conflict, and more suffering, until - someday - old men would make peace. ~ Ben Rhodes

Brazil will change when its cities change. ~ Jaime Lerner

After the 1929 crash, the Federal Reserve mistakenly focused its policies on preserving the gold value of the dollar rather than on stabilizing the domestic economy. ~ Ben Bernanke

Keeping your face to the sunshine and your vibes positively high,
Helps one in hard times use a smile to replace their sigh ~ Timothy Pina

You cannot reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into ~ Ben Goldacre

I said, 'Then whered the other story come from? ... '
He said, 'It come in to my mynd.'
I said, 'You mean you made it up.'
He said, 'Wel no I dint make it up you cant make up nothing in your head no moren you can make up what you see. You know what I mean may be what you see aint all ways there so you cud reach out and touch it but its there some kynd of way and it come from some where. That place Hagmans Il I use to wunner about it every time we come by it til finely that story come in to my head. That story cudnt come out of no where cud it so it musve come out of some where. Parbly it ben in that place from time back way back or may be in a nother place only the idear of it come to me there. That don't make no odds. That storys jus what ever it is and thats what storys are. ~ Russell Hoban

Ben Says: Make up your mind & do away with your fears or your fears will do away with you! ~ Timothy Pina

There are almost no limits to the discoveries of how the human brain operates in illness and health, in sleep and waking and dreaming, in calm and under tension. The question is how far man can put these discoveries to use without using them not for cure but for power. ~ Max Lerner

Compromise is most likely when both parties respect each other no matter how much they disagree. In stressful situations where you need a consensus, respect sometimes means saying nothing and refraining from name-calling even when irritated. ~ Ben Carson

Still to be neat, still to be drest,
As you were going to a feast,
Still to be powder'd, all perfum'd.
Lady, it is to be presumed,
Though art's hid causes are not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound. ~ Ben Jonson

I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn't go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually. ~ Ben Fountain

This is I think a dramatic point for conservatives. They are waking up to the fact that this guy, that Donald Trump has an ability to speak to people who they thought were theirs ideologically, people who they thought were a part of their team. ~ Ben Domenech

This is going to hurt, but you will have to watch other couples be happier, richer and louder than you. Wait. No obstacle can withstand patience. Wait. You may not think so now, but there will come a time when you will be tempted to run away. Would that be right? Would that be fair? As every matriarch discovers, entire seasons will pass without reward. As your mate's peculiarities add up, what do you do? Wait!
pg 45 ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

Just remember that this relationship is based on mutual trust and respect, so never reveal your true self. ~ Betsy Lerner

Like young men from the dawn of time, I decided to choose the risk of death over certain humiliation. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

For The Rest Of My Life I Will Thank And Praise You Lord. You Have Pulled Me Out Of Darkness And Despair. Like My Forefather David ... I Hold Onto Your Promises. I am Blessed By You ... Each And Everyday. For As Long As The Sun Will Shine ... I Will Give You Thanks For Your Love And Kindness. I Will Serve And Praise You For The Rest Of My Days. ~ Timothy Pina

The government is supposed to conform to our will. By taking the most important thing you have, your health and your health care, and turning that over to the government, you fundamentally shift the power, a huge chunk of it, from the people to the government. This is not the direction that we want the government to go in this nation. ~ Ben Carson

Look for people in your life that who will help calm the storms in your soul rather than challenge it to a battle. Peace should always be your first priority.in your life. ~ Timothy Pina

Look at the collective hurt of the individuals trapped in their subjective experience of this world. Will they ever be free from their limited and distinct experience? Or will they forever be confined to being themselves for all of eternity in an eternal recurrence? Hope not. ~ Ben Caesar

In an ideal world, both parties would desire to uphold the Constitution, ~ Ben Carson

I hadn't been able to trust since the age of four. I was torn between wanting to be cradled and telling the world to go fuck itself, and those were opposite sides of the same coin. ~ Betsy Lerner

A gold standard doesn't imply stability in the prices of the goods and services that people buy every day, it implies a stability in the price of gold itself. ~ Ben Bernanke

The authorities? The authorities?" I laughed. "Why is it people think the authorities are some form of gods with either great justice or great, cunning evil, rather than the same plodding fools they see in their daily lives, and most of all in their mirrors? ~ Richard Ben Sapir

I don't get it, man. That dude has zero game, then suddenly he up and jets with a hottie? Meanwhile I can't buy a date."
"Makes no sense." Hi, face serious.
I pressed a fist to my lips, considering. "What'd the girl look like?"
"Hot."
Ben shifted his weight. I heard Hi chuckle behind me.
I choked back my mounting frustration. "Could you be more specific?"
"Oh, right." Cole rubbed his oily chin and squinted at the ceiling. "She had, like, nice hair. It was sorta . . . black? Or maybe brown. Not blonde, for sure. And she was kinda tall. But not really. Oh, and I think she wore a T-shirt. Could be wrong, though."
I stared at the useless witness before me.
What a moron.
"Can you remember anything else, Cole?" Catching his eye, I tried to urge the memory from his brain by force of will. "Anything at all?"
For a moment, Cole's face screwed up in thought, then it bloomed with contentment. "He said I could have his mattress. Solid dude, that Jordan."

Hi snapped on his seat belt. "Not everyone is college material."
Shelton shook his head. "I'm surprised that guy remembers to breathe. ~ Kathy Reichs

I wonder if we have it all backward. And I wonder how the world might be if we viewed the very reason for our existence as being not about control and security but about surrender. Not to our fears and insecurities but to our sense of what is possible, to the belief that we all have the ability to shape the world as we imagine it, and that our actions reflect this imagined world until it becomes not imagined, but real. ~ Ben Hewitt

I try to live my life like my father lives his. He always takes care of everyone else first. He won't even start eating until he's sure everyone else in the family has started eating. Another thing: My dad never judges me by whether I win or lose. ~ Ben Roethlisberger

I don't want to be like the actor who rehearses everything in the bathroom, then comes to the set and carries on completely uninterrupted while the other actors tiptoe away. ~ Ben Kingsley

When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today. ~ Ben Shahn

But war can't be personal," I say, almost asking it.
"If it's the person that'll end the war," Ben says. "Then it's not personal, it's universal. ~ Patrick Ness

Sometimes we look for those thunderous things to happen in our life for our lives to change or go in the other direction. We seek the miracle. We seek the parting of the seas, the moving of the mountains. But no, it's a quiet thing. At least for me it was. ~ Ben Vereen