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Quote by Ben Lerner

“Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.”

Quote by Ben Lerner

Author

Ben Lerner, born on February 4, 1979, is an American poet known for his unique style and profound reflections on contemporary social issues. more

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“When I was a kid and we played baseball we used to use that "eye black" stuff sometimes - that kind of grease you put under your eyes to reduce glare or something. We only used it, of course, to look cool; it's not like we were any better prepubescent athletes for reducing glare.”

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“I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and put that under our eyes. So our faces were glowing - a kind of night vision.”

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“I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it's imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it's an antidote to despair.”

Ifs Thinking World Way Stills Ideas Reason Powerful One Thing Despair Redemption Peculiar Antidote Parables

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“Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.”

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

Feels Logic Saturated

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“I'm increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how there are all kinds of moments in our daily lives that break - or at least could break - from the logic of profit and the modes of domination it entails. Zones of freedom, even if it's never pure.”

Ifs Kind Moments Sides Talking Break Pure Logic Notion Profit All Kinds Zone Daily Life Thinker Domination Totality Talking Back

Author:Ben Lerner

“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.”

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“I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.”

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“I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts - all these things have to be harnessed by the political. The libidinal has to be harnessed by the political.”

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“I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.”

Thinking Kind Literature Ability Fiction Bounds Contemporary Posts Blogs Sitcom Intellectualism Contemporary Fiction

Author:Ben Lerner