A Handbook of Disappointed Fate Quotes

“There is a lot of room for a meaning inside a "no" spoken in the tremendous logic of a refused order of the world. Poetry's no can protect a potential yes--or more precisely, poetry's no is the one that can protect the hell yeah, or every hell yeah's variations. In this way, every poem against the police is also and always a guardian of love for the world.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“The object of love is not an object at all, and that you’ve mistaken a person for an object is what’s wrong with love’s distortions. To feel the wretched pain of a love after a love has long ended is not just to feel the pain at losing love but feel pain at the way love turns a person into a possession that can be lost.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“Poetry, which was once itself a searching engine, exists in abundance now, as searchable and as immaterial as any other information. As it always had, poetry experiments in fashionable confusions, excels in the popular substitutive fantasies of its time, mistakes self-expression for sovereignty. But in making the world blurry, distressing, and forgettable, poetry now has near limitless competition.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“The pantheon of those who won’t is the best church poetry has to offer. It’s a temple perfumed with the incense of sacrificed literary reputation, littered with bankruptcy notices for cynical cultural capital, warmed by the greater fire of the intrinsic, populated by the most famous and the most anon.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“There is a lot of room for a meaning inside a “no” spoken in the tremendous logic of a refused order of the world.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“And what is the trial of today if art has lived on after its failed self-abolition, aerosolized, manic and ambulatory, freed from the constraints of medium and modality, living on as a form of management, living on a form of flexi-feeling, living on in an already granted self-dissolution, living on as resilience in all the resilient horror? Would it find a compromise in silence? Might it make a clandestine opening of a thousand leaves?”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“I was heavy with exasperation in a city of pre-apocalyptic heat and pre-emptively obsolesced futurity. It was a city that expanded beyond its capacity in advance of itself, a city designed to punish anyone poor or ugly or infirm in it, I thought, the moment the globe went hot, I thought, the season the water ran out, I thought, on a bus in Los Angeles in a heat wave. (…) I needed the purple line or the red line to Union Station then the San Bernardino line back to Claremont back to my host’s, but I was feeling so hard for the people in the heat wave, people at the bus stop sweating like I was sweating, all of us the tragic consequence, I thought, of the historical forces that enabled Matthew Barney’s gilded shit.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“What these museums and landscapes and other sites and materials must consent to is the possibility of being structured along the lines of cognition that are themselves structured along the lines of language which was at first structured itself along the lines of the material world but having met a point at which the question was slow decay or fast oblivion, chose oblivion and loosed itself into what other possibilities were detached from what could be heard or felt.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“Every object and environment that already exists has to feel like it isn’t enough. There can be no heaviness of the feeling of the too-muchness of the world: not the heavy feeling of the too-muchness of asphalt, or of amphitheaters, soda bottles, modular furniture, or orange traffic cones. Instead, you must be able to look out over the landscape of what is and to say, as if you mean it, there is not enough here.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“Poetry is (…) good at going against, saying whatever is the opposite of something else, providing nonsense for sense and sense despite the world’s alarming nonsense.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

“In order for what seemed permanent to now reveal itself as provisional, it might help you to have experienced a few significant threats to the fixedness of things.”
― Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate