Quotes from Ben Lerner

It was as though it had already happened; predicting it felt like recalling a traumatic event.

Sima made a space for me to hear that there were depths beneath what I was saying that I hadn't sounded yet.

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.

There was some kind of special power involved in repurposing language, redistributing the voices, changing the principle of patterning, faint sparks of alternative meaning in the shadow of the original sense, the narrative.

Emerging from the train, I found it was fully night, the air excited by foreboding and something else, something like the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seemed like a technology for defeating time, or like defeated time itself falling from the sky, each glittering ice particle an instant gifted back from your routine.

But there are no grown-ups; that's what you must grow up to know fully.

I sounded angry, felt nothing.

Her breath smelled terrible and I told myself to commit that fact to memory, to remember it the next time I was intimidated by her unwavering grace.

What you need to do is harness the self-love you are hypostasizing as offspring, as the next generation of you, and let it branch out horizontally into the possibility of a transpersonal revolutionary subject in the present and coconstruct a world in which moments can be something other than the elements of profit.

Ningún escritor es libre de renunciar a su momento político, pero la literatura refleja la política, no influye en ella, una distinción importante.

The opposite of a truth," Klaus quoted, "is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth"—pause for emphasis, sound of sprinklers, insects, push mowers, felt absence of city noise, Kenny Rogers from a passing car—"may be another profound truth.

the more profound the statement, the more reversible; the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed, just as there is no principle of noncontradiction, no law of excluded middle, governing the unconscious. Then, briefly serious, Klaus would touch my shoulder: A quote like that can save your life.

If he had the language, he wouldn't express himself with symptoms.

Klaus's charm, at least for me, was that his voice already sounded like an imitation of itself; Klaus was an actor bemused to be playing Klaus. And yet the effect of this doubling was generous, self-deprecating;

Another historic storm had failed to arrive, as though we lived outside of history or were falling out of time.

the world is always ending for each of us and if one begins to withdraw from the possibilities of experience, then no one would take any of the risks involved with love.

it was clear to everyone at the table who had any experience with men and alcohol—especially men who had won international literary prizes—that he was not going to stop talking at any point in the meal.

The worst is over. I am with you," I quoted, "and I know how it is.

Others began soliciting speech from him, where did you buy those awesome boots, is that a hickey or a bruise, do you still practice martial arts?

The more abysmal the experience of the actual, the greater the implied heights of the virtual.

Part of what makes the book bizzare is that Whitman, because he wants to stand for everyone, because he wants to be less a historical person than a marker for democratic personhood, can't really write a memoir full of a life's particularities.

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

The chicken is a little dry and/or you've ruined my life.

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.