Ben Lerner Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

I'll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.

Ben Lerner

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

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

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

I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.

Ben Lerner

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

Ben Lerner

Ben Lerner

Ben Lerner

Born: February 4, 1979 (age 45)

Bio: Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the National Book Award, a Howard Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and he is currently a MacArthur Fellow.

Known for:

10:04 (2014)
Leaving the Atocha Station (2011)
The Hatred of Poetry (2016)
The Lichtenberg figures (2004)
Angle of Yaw (2006)

Ben Lerner on Wikipedia

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