Quotes from Ben Lerner

part of me was trying not to react to my mom's palpable concern about how much the meal would cost.

one I had— The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you. A fiction you'd forgotten was there.

You're asking me to be a flickering presence.

the abyss of non-belief, the vacuum, cannot be filled with stuff

Poetry" is a word for a kind of value no particular poem can realize: the value of persons, the value of human activity beyond the labor/leisure divide, a value before or beyond price. Thus hating poetry can either be a way of negatively expressing poetry as an ideal [or] it can be a defensive rage against the mere suggestion that another world, another measure of value, is possible.

Because you believe, even though you'll deny it, that writing has some kind of magical power. And you're probably crazy enough to make your fiction come true somehow.

familiar with the "fine print" one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with those thousands of words was comprehend them.

he passed, as he often passed, a mysterious threshold. He began to feel less like he was delivering a speech and more like a speech was delivering him, that the rhythm and intonation of his presentation were beginning to dictate its content, that he no longer had to organize his arguments so much as let them flow through him.

he was nevertheless more in the realm of poetry than of prose, his speech stretched by speed and intensity until he felt its referential meaning dissolve into pure form.

And I felt as if it were true: as if she were dying and not dead, or as if the train could take me back in time.

All these lacrimal events and bouts of depersonalization were no doubt leading, I was then convinced, to the onset of schizophrenia. Indeed, the irony of my recent cardiac diagnosis was that it gave me an objective reason for my emotional turbulences and so was, in that sense, stabilizing: now I was reckoning with a specific existential threat, not just the vacuum of existence.

The lie described my life better than the truth,' I added. 'Until it became a kind of truth.

They felt at once profoundly numb and profoundly ecstatic to be young and inflicting optional damage on each other;

I find this less scandalous than beautiful: a kind of palimpsestic plagiarism that moves through bodies and time, a collective song with no single origin, or whose origin has been erased--the way a star, from our earthly perspective, is often survived by its own light.

The stars dehisce. By "stars" I mean, of course, tradition , and by "tradition" I mean nothing at all. A pronoun disembowels his antecedent. Stop me if you've heard this one before.

Great poets confront the limits of actual poems, tactically defeat or at least suspend that actuality, sometimes quit writing altogether, becoming celebrated for their silence; truly horrible poets unwittingly provide a glimmer of virtual possibility via the extremity of their failure; avant-garde poets hate poems for remaining poems instead of becoming bombs; and nostalgists hate poems for failing to do what they wrongly, vaguely claim poetry once did.

I'd become the unreliable narrator of my first novel.

The former says he waits for me ahead, but I doubt I'll arrive in time . . .

I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness

But this was true only for the duration of one of these seemingly durationless periods; figure and ground could be reversed, and when one was in the midst of some new intensity, kiss or concussion, one was suddenly composed exclusively of such moments, burning always with this hard, gemlike flame.

Who wasn't squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said "I"; who wasn't a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life?

Trying to make normal conversation . . . I felt like a character actor trying to return to an old role.

I imagined this scene taking place simultaneously in kitchens all across suburbia, a vast performance of which the actors are unaware, directed by a mysterious force that goes by the name or misnomer of "culture

It's like there is a video game inside his head except what happens there will happen here.