I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity. Ben Lerner
Some Similar Quotes
  1. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you,... - Pablo Neruda
  2. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul. - Pablo Neruda
  3. We love the things we love for what they are. - Robert Frost
  4. I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart) I am never without it (anywhereI go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling) I fear no fate (for you are my fate, my... - E.e. Cummings
  5. Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. - Plato
More Quotes By Ben Lerner
  1. 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,...
  2. Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem–no such thing–a place for the genuine,...
  3. Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical–the human world of violence and difference–and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon...
  4. Since the world is ending, ” Peter quoted from behind us, “why not let the children touch the paintings?
  5. I believe she imbued my body thus, finding every touch enhanced by ambiguity of intention, as if it too required translation, and so each touch branched out, became a variety of touches.
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