Quotes from Ben Lerner

the threshold between the hospital and its outside was like a threshold between worlds, between media.

I'll project myself into several futures simultaneously.

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.

The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. [...] Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.

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.

Whatever we think of particular poems, "poetry" is a word for the meeting place of the private and the public, the internal and the external: My capacity to express myself poetically and to comprehend such expression is a fundamental qualification for public recognition.

nocturnal walks along the promenade with the looming intensities of Manhattan glittering across dark water.

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

I asked him to look at me and then promised him in two languages the only thing I could: he had nothing to fear from Joseph Kony.

How easily worlds are crossed.

Poetry isn't hard, it's impossible.

It was no longer a little different from itself, no longer an emissary from a world to come.

The electorate, Adam had read in The Economist, would grow increasingly diverse and the Republicans would die off as a national party even if something remained the matter with Kansas;

Famous in Topeka" would be a great name for a band)

what could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout?

The voices and laughter and birds and wind and traffic combined and separated gently.

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.

I felt a jealous anger rising within me, a desire for her to desire me, the only kind of desire, Alex had once told me during a fight, I was able to sustain.

This is wonderful, the life I lead here, no matter if it's mine.

None of the past was usable.

But we were also Jewish, one of two Jewish families in our neighborhood, our complex, our compound, and the ovens had been active only fifteen years before.

What I knew as much by instinct as by training was that when a boy like Jacob shows up in your cramped but light-filled office, you should not under any circumstances ask him to account for his behavior[...] Jacob would be the last person capable of such an account; if he had the language he wouldn't express himself with symptoms.

The power of it was all finally there, finally real for me.

What could be lonelier than a child in space?