1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Ben Lerner

Ben Lerner Quotes

Total quotes: 8
“I find this less scandalous than beautiful: a kind of palimpsestic plagiarism that moves through bodies and time, a collective song with no single origin, or whose origin has been erased— the way a star, from our earthly perspective, is often survived by its own light.”
— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy
Tagged: Originality, Plagiarism, Quote
“If you want to pick out the devastated or soon-to-be-devastated from the stream of people leaving Mount Sinai, I decided, don't look for frank expressions of sorrow or concern, look for people whose faces resemble those of passengers deplaning after a long flight— a blank expression as the body begins adjusting to a new time zone and ground speed.”
— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy
Tagged: Expressions of Sorrow, Sadness
“I thought about kissing her on the forehead but rejected the idea immediately; whatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm; even that relatively avuncular gesture would be strange for both of us now. More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Alex, just like the sociability with strangers or the aura around objects, wasn't just over, but retrospectively erased. Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they'd faded from the photograph.”
— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy
Tagged: The Emergency Changes Things
“Overhead the stars occluded by light pollution were presences like words projected through time and I was aware that water surrounded the city, and that the water moved; I was aware of the delicacy of the bridges and tunnels spanning it, and of the traffic through those arteries, as though some cortical reorganization now allowed me to take the infrastructure personally, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body.”
— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy
Tagged: Blackwater, Water
“Finally I found something on the list, something vital: instant coffee. I held the red plastic container, one of the last three on the shelf, held it like the marvel that it was: the seeds inside the purple fruits of coffee plants had been harvested on Andean slopes and roasted and ground and soaked and then dehydrated at a factory in Medellín and vacuum-sealed and flown to JFK and then driven upstate in bulk to Pearl River for repackaging and then transported back by truck to the store where I now stood reading the label. It was as if the social relations that produced the object in my hand began to glow within it as they were threatened, stirred inside their packaging, lending it a certain aura — the majesty and murderous stupidity of that organization of time and space and fuel and labor becoming visible in the commodity itself now that planes were grounded and the highways were starting to close.”
— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy
Tagged: Capitalist Movements
“I breathed in the night air that was or was not laced with anachronistic blossoms and felt the small thrill I always felt to a lesser or greater degree when I looked at Manhattan's skyline and the innumerable illuminated windows and the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the FDR Drive and the present absence of the towers. It was a thrill that only built space produced in me, never the natural world, and only when there was an incommensurability of scale— the human dimension of the windows tiny from such distance combining but not dissolving into the larger architecture of the skyline that was the expression, the material signature, of a collective person who didn't yet exist, a still-uninhabited second person plural to whom all the arts, even in their most intimate registers, were nevertheless addressed. Only an urban experience of the sublime was available to me because only then was the greatness beyond calculation the intuition of community. Bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather patterns of increasing severity— whenever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman's side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body. What I felt when I tried to take in the skyline— and instead was taken in by it— was a fullness indistinguishable from being emptied, my personality dissolving into a personhood so abstract that every atom belonging to me as good belonged to Noor, the fiction of the world rearranging itself around her.”
— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy
Tagged: Disappear Here, New York City, Urban Landscape
“As I made and unmade a variety of overlapping narratives out of its found footage, I felt acutely how many different days could be built out of a day, felt more possibility than determinism, the utopian glimmer of fiction. When I looked at my watch to see a unit of measure identical to the one displayed on the screen, I was indicating that a distance remained between art and the mundane. Everything will be as it is now— the room, the baby, the clothes, the minutes— just a little different.”
— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy
Tagged: Ficiton, Time
“The intern broke off from us to join one of the groups and Diane led us out of the room and into the adjacent kitchen, also giant, a thousand copper pots and pans hanging from a rack above an island the size of my apartment. I was introduced to Diane's friend, a handsome woman with silver hair, silver jewelry, and green eyes, who then introduced me to the other people drinking wine and beer around a table that had once been a door; Monika knew everyone. The people in the kitchen were considerably older than those in the living room, as if the parents had retreated to let the kids have their fun at the party— except, disrupting that image, a heavy man with long hair and a beard was dividing a small pile of cocaine with a straight razor on a silver tray. His T-shirt read: JESUS HATES YOU. Diane's friend pointed us to the drinks.”
— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy
loading next page...