Ben Lerner famous quotes

03-26-2025

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

#Cutting #Way #Shaving
Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.
-- Ben Lerner

#Cutting #Fog #Feelings
Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.
-- Ben Lerner

#Astronaut #Cases
Iâ€™ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.
-- Ben Lerner

#Cities #Would Be #Way
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.
-- Ben Lerner

#Reading #White #Important
What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.
-- Ben Lerner

#Light #Tears #Fiction
The scare quotes burn off like fog.
-- Ben Lerner

#Fog #Scare
If I was a poet, 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, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
-- Ben Lerner

#Practice #Admitting #Kind
Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.
-- Ben Lerner

#Dream #Moving #Cutting
Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
-- Ben Lerner

#Art #Despair #Offers
I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
-- Ben Lerner

#Real #Liars #Bipolar

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