Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

My experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that's all I'd ever really wanted from my body, such as it was.

And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation, the more intensely the author worried about distinguishing himself from the narrator, the more he felt he had become him.

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.

nothing in the world, I thought to myself, is as old as what was futuristic in the past.

To the distinguished female author's left was her husband, probably also distinguished in some way, who had the look of many husbands: eyebrows perpetually raised a little in a defensive mask of polite interest, signifying boredom.

Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent.

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.

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

Maybe I liked his sculpture more when I couldn't get close to it, had to see it from a fixed position through a pane of glass, so that I had to project myself into the encounter with its three-dimensionality.

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.

There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don't have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.

I became fascinated with this phenomenon of hearing loud voices at a distance and trying to account how I knew they were loud when I can barely hear them. Something about their shapes or their shapelessness or the way they filter through the walls.

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

Possessing a weapon has made me bashful. Tears appreciate in this economy of pleasure. The ether of data engulfs the capitol. Possessing a weapon has made me forgetful. My oboe tars her cenotaph. The surface is in process. Coruscant skinks emerge in force. The moon spits on a copse of spruce. Plausible opposites stir in the brush. Jupiter spins in its ruts. The wind extends its every courtesy. I have never been here. Understand? You have never seen me.

there were eighty or so people gathered to listen to this utter shit as though it were their daily language passing through the crucible of the human sprint and emerging purified, redeemed.

my goal was to make the kid feel heard. I didn't mind the cliché; in fact, I admired the phrase, its rightness of fit, a mixture of the somatic and semantic; maybe it explained the desire for heavy metal that registered as touch as much as sound.

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.

It was like how, when he read a poem to himself, the rhymes were neither sound nor silence. Unheard melodies in the mind's ear. The muted music of consciousness.

The collective effort of repression was tremendous, made the alcohol indispensable. An intense but contentless optimism about the future was the only protection against the recent past, in which all the regimes of value had collapsed, irradiated or gassed.

The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you. A fiction you'd forgotten was there. Frame, crossbeams, slats, braces, joins. Revealing the softer sapwood, which is marked by candle burns. ...Jonathan holding both of my hands under the table, one of the first times we'd really touched. You must think I'm a lunatic. No, I think it's a beautiful story. About family and art and memory and meaning, how it's made and unmade.

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.