Quotes from Lyn Hejinian

I was eventually to become one person, gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma.

People must flatter their own eyes with their pathetic lives. The things I was saying followed logically the things that I had said before, yet bore no relation to what I was thinking and feeling.

In every country is a word which attempts the sound of cats, to match an inisolable portrait in the clouds to a din in the air. But the constant noise is not an omen of music to come.

Drinking Shirley Temple with my Mary Janes on, let's say that every possibility waits

A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of one person, but nothing is isolated in history -- certain humans are situations.

A work of art is a prophetic loan, drawn on fugitive premises; the artist acts on it, and, presumably, sustains some faith that others will do so too, or at least could.

Allegories are told with a purpose whose possibility is lost Until a potato-eater appears and eats potatoes

The sky was packed which by appearing endless seems inevitable. The flag droops straight down. The horse in dry sand walks with a chirping noise from friction of the particles and counterarguments like pack ice puff in the waves there, blowing fountains of pearl. The ground.

The work of art offers an experience of contradictions and incommensurabilities – these are much better than truths.

But daily life and art occupy different space-times; a museum, a concert hall, a page of text, an art gallery are more likely to be experienced as refuges from daily life than as its venue.

Long time lines trail behind every idea, object, person, pet, vehicle, and event.

Everything is a question of sleep, says Cocteau, but he forgets the shark, which does not. Anxiety is vigilant.

Ambiguities everywhere should be collected as evidence of ambivalence.