Self Lerner Quotes

Read, re-read and un-read! ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

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

the laboratories established by German pharmaceutical and dye manufacturers in the 1880s and 1890s as the first truly institutionalized research laboratories, and to General Electric's 1900 laboratory as the pioneer in America.17 ~ Josh Lerner

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

I want to believe humanity has not forgotten how to explore. ~ Edward M. Lerner

I've never really seen other people spend other people's money wisely. ~ Sandra Lerner

I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations and I have not provided false information to this or any other committee. ~ Lois 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

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 fact is that life has become a sweepstake. Millions of people who have lost the sense of being able to make anything of the collective effort of shaping their economic society, now expect fortune to descend like pie from the sky. ~ Max Lerner

Every city has to deal with the problem of cars and public transport. ~ Jaime Lerner

Corporations care very much about maintaining the myth that government is necessarily ineffective, except when it is spending money on the military-industrial complex, building prisons, or providing infrastructural support for the business sector. ~ Michael Lerner

There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak? ~ Alan Jay Lerner

Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant of their own history [do] not know what women before them had thought and taught. So generation after generation, they [struggle] for insights others had already had before them, [resulting in] the constant inventing of the wheel. ~ Gerda Lerner

The human heart is like a big mess of embroidery silks, and the more you pull, the more they tangle. The thing is, the threads have only got one end, if that. You can't sort them all out into colors. You just pick the ones you want and hold one to them as best you can. ~ Rose Lerner

It's the worst sort of snobbery to condemn a book without reading it, merely because it's popular. ~ Rose Lerner

Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships. ~ Harriet 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

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

Curitiba is not a paradise. We have all the problems that most Latin American cities have. We have slums. We have the same difficulties, but the big difference is the respect given by people due to the quality of the services which are provided. ~ Jaime Lerner

Every step by which men add to their knowledge and skills is a step also by which they can control other men. ~ Max Lerner

We have to change from 'ego-architecture' to 'eco-architecture.' ~ Jaime Lerner

I have always regretted instances in which I failed to live up to the highest standards of conduct or principles of compassion that I cherish and teach. Being human, I anticipate regretting future failures. ~ K. Lee Lerner

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

Time travel offends our sense of cause and effect - but maybe the universe doesn't insist on cause and effect. ~ Edward M. 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

...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

The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course - it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth. What will come after, what kind of structure will be the foundation for alternate forms of social organization we cannot yet know. We are living in an age of unprecedented transformation. We are in the process of becoming. ~ Gerda Lerner

You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace. ~ Max 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

We will be in tune with our bodies only if we truly love and honor them. We can't be in good communication with the enemy. ~ Harriet Lerner

To create what it does, Hollywood has to draw young people, often of unstable temperment, from all over the world. It plunges them into exacting work
surrounds them with a sensuous life
and cuts them off from the normal sources of living. ~ Max Lerner

Fear has never helped anybody make good choices. It leads to clinging when we should be walking. ~ Harriet Lerner

But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world. ~ Betsy Lerner

I had officially joined the cacophony of sick mother fuckers. ~ Betsy Lerner

Keep in mind that the tendency to be judgmental - toward yourself or another person - is a good barometer of how anxious or stressed out you are. Judging others is simply the flip side of judging yourself. ~ Harriet Lerner

I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from? The desire to destroy myself? This last depression had scared me. It had come on so quickly, not like the gradual woolgathering in my brain I had known before. ~ Betsy Lerner

You see what happens today. Women act like men and want to be treated like women. ~ Alan Jay Lerner

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

A city grows like an organism. It is a structure of living and working together a mix of functions. ~ Jaime 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

The term girl not only serves to avoid certain anxiety-arousing connotations inherent in the word woman regarding aggression, sexuality, and reproduction, it also serves to impart a tone of frivolousness and lack of seriousness to ambitious, intellectual, and competitive striving that women may pursue. ~ Harriet Lerner

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

Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent. ~ Max Lerner

This focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships ... Many Americans hunger for a different kind of society - one based on principles of caring, ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal solidarity. Their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security. ~ Michael 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

Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there. ~ Max Lerner