94 Quotes by Ben Lerner

How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?

Think about how often – before cell phones, before any kind of caller ID – you answered the landline as a child and had to have an exchange, however brief, with aunts or uncles or family friends. Even if it was that five-second check-in, How are you doing, how is school, is your mom around – it meant periodic real-time vocal contact with an extended community, which, through repetition, it reinforced.

Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.

I like to think – knowing that it’s an enabling fiction – of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn’t the only measure of value.

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

I’m trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.

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.

The problem is that if you’re self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn’t something lost – some kind of presence? You’re distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.

Happy were the ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, ages of such perfect social integration that no drug was required to link the hero to the whole.