94 Quotes by Ben Lerner

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

I had the endless day, months and months of endless days, and yet my return date bounded this sense of boundlessness, kept it from becoming threatening.

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.

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.

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.

The fatal problem with poetry: poems.

Poetry": What kind of art assumes the dislike of its audience and what kind of artist aligns herself with that dislike, even encourages it? An art hated from without and within.

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.

Может быть, просодия и грамматика - тот материал, из которого мы творим социум, способ организации смысла и времени, не принадлежащий никому по отдельности, но циркулирующий сквозь нас всех?