Jeff > Jeff's Quotes

“I beg you not to read anything threatening, or even prophetic, into my words, Mr. Clarke. Simply take them as a description, or a 'law' if you like. This circle around a law is a world in miniature within our world, which itself is a miniature. We create the world to fit in with our personal system, so that man can become world. In other words, so that the miniature can become miniature. But miniatures have their own laws, you know. It is not only space which can become minute: it also happens to the corresponding time, which becomes extremely fast. That is why life is so short.”
― César Aira, The Hare

“If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why "learn to be alone" in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“My experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that’s all I’d ever really wanted from my body, such as it was.”
― Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

“A few birds flew out from the mountains and glided for a while without sound. Standing out against the sky on high slopes beyond a range of low hills, they saw an endless herd of deer, rendered mute by distance. The landscape was reminiscent of a cardboard cutout, but on a huge scale, which gave the impression they were the ones who had become miniatures…All three of them were equally lost.”
― César Aira, The Hare

“Poison or elixir, narcotic or aphrodisiac, whatever it was, this flower, relic of a day in the life of an accidental writer, an inadvertent counterfeiter leaving his traces in code, the birds were coming to try it, performing a dance for no one and flying up toward the moon.”
― César Aira, Varamo

“He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass.”
― César Aira, Varamo

“A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: to choose the best unhappiness. An unwise move, good God, you could squander everything.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn't stand the sight of it.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“What greater stimulus to ambition than the promise that the goals of which we dream, the nobility of spirit to which we aspire, the indwelling of gods and the radiance of their power, are but waiting to be discovered in the consciousness of man? Play the harp enough times, an angel you become. This, at any rate, is what the handbook says.”
― Fiona Maazel, Last Last Chance

“I like the way he says we and am amazed, as I often am by language as power, at the way a simple pronoun can upend a relationship.”
― Fiona Maazel, Last Last Chance

“Dear God, please take away this hurt because I cannot stand it, and I want a chance, maybe just one more chance to show up for my life and to enjoy it, even if it’s only for a day or a couple hours, I just want a chance, the same as the next guy, though I know I deserve it less.”
― Fiona Maazel, Last Last Chance

“But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability.”
― Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

“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, Leaving the Atocha Station

“When I spoke to her in Spanish I was not translating, I was not thinking my thoughts in English first, but I was nevertheless outside the language I was speaking, building simple sentences with the blocks I’d memorized, not communicating through a fluid medium.”
― Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

“It must be borne in mind that the tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn’t a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. It is not a disaster to be unable to capture your ideal, but it is a disaster to have no ideal to capture. It is not a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for. Not failure, but low aim is sin.”
― Benjamin E Mays

“I also knew that the deep rumble rolling through us was only nerves, a sensitivity to imagined repercussion, as if a sound were built into revenge.”
― Nathan Englander

“No, no," Arnie says. "Fondle--fondle is to touch. Everything sounds Yiddish to you. Far-fetched, far-flung..." "Farflung is Yiddish." "No," Arnie says, "it's not.”
― Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

“Maybe I liked his sculpture more when I couldn’t get close to it, had to see it from a fixed position through a pane of glass, so that I had to project myself into the encounter with its three-dimensionality.”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“She chose you for your deficiencies, not in spite of them, a new kind of mating strategy for millennial women whose priority is keeping the more disastrous fathers away, not establishing a nuclear family.”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“It's important to avoid mirrors if one is unprepared to accept their daily news, and I think, in something as insignificantly devastating as appearance, denial is more socially constructive than despondency. Not that there's anything especially wrong with me--just the usual.”
― Rivka Galchen, American Innovations

“I'm not one of these people who are disheartened that the universe is expanding. But as news and data breed and the crowded channels grow ever noisier, I do feel that the space is ever increasing between me and it, whatever it might be.”
― Rivka Galchen

“Even the most normal person, if placed in a highly abnormal situation, can be mistakenly perceived as the source of abnormality of the person/circumstance aggregate”
― Rivka Galchen, American Innovations

“I barely even know how I didn't feel. I didn't feel like reading a newspaper, or having a coffee, or going for a jog, or watching television. Nor did I feel like crying behind the boiler in the basement. Or like trying out for something. I did't even feel like I had lost someone I deeply loved; this was different from that. I didn't feel like going to another movie and asking for extra butter on my popcorn. I didn't feel like talking to someone who would understand.”
― Rivka Galchen, American Innovations

“That’s how he saw the contradictory and even unbearable situation of being enclosed in a language that didn’t think like he did but like his father: that’s where those desires to rebel against his own home came from.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Informers

“The gradual and imperceptible subsidence of the waters, that’s the alluvium. Thus am I gradually left alone, thus have I been left alone.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Informers

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Our fathers were often away. But then sometimes, out of the blue, they’d be gone forever. Often away and gone forever: the two phrases marked the difference between having a living father and a dead one. It wasn’t a big difference, but it was big enough to make us cry when no one was looking. One”
― Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned