Quotes from 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.

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

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

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

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.

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.

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.

the real men—who are themselves in fact perpetual boys, since America is adolescence without end—had to differentiate themselves with violence

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.

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.

I had the endless day, months and months of endless days, and yet my return date bounded this sense of boundlessness, kept it from becoming threatening.

It was worse than having a sinking feeling; I was a sinking feeling, an unplayable adagio for strings; internal distances expanded and collapsed when I breathed.

The opposite of a truth," Klaus quoted, "is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth...may be another profound truth." It either is or is not August...if I assert it's August when it isn't--simply false; but if I say that life is pain, that is true, profoundly so; so, too, that life is joy; the more profound the statement, the more reversible the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed... [Niels Bohr]

And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation

The fatal problem with poetry: poems.

we thought that if we had a language for our feelings we might transcend them.

a face you know intimately is most disturbingly altered when it's altered only slightly;

The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media," I said, meaninglessly.

discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of the world to come, where everything is the same but a little different because the past will be citable in all of its moments, including those that from our present present happened but never occurred.

Objecting to the diagnosis of penis envy was a sure sign of penis envy.

Think about how often—before cell phones, before any kind of caller ID—you answered the landline as a child and had to have an exchange, however brief, with aunts or uncles or family friends. Even if it was that five-second check-in, How are you doing, how is school, is your mom around—it meant periodic real-time vocal contact with an extended community, which, through repetition, it reinforced.

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.

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

But there are no grown-ups, that's what you must grow up to know fully; your parents were just two more bodies experiencing landscape and weather, trying to make sense by vibrating columns of air, redescribing contingency as necessity with religion or World Ice Theory or the Jewish science, cutting profound truths with their opposites as the regimes of meaning collapse into the spread.