Lyn Hejinian > Quotes

“I was eventually to become one person, gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma.”
― Lyn Hejinian

“To some extent, each sentence has to be the whole story.”
― Lyn Hejinian

“People must flatter their own eyes with their pathetic lives. The things I was saying followed logically the things that I had said before, yet bore no relation to what I was thinking and feeling.”
― Lyn Hejinian, My Life

“In every country is a word which attempts the sound of cats, to match an inisolable portrait in the clouds to a din in the air. But the constant noise is not an omen of music to come.”
― Lyn Hejinian, My Life

“Drinking Shirley Temple with my Mary Janes on,
let's say that every possibility waits”
― Lyn Hejinian, My Life

“A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of one person, but nothing is isolated in history -- certain humans are situations.”
― Lyn Hejinian, My Life

“A work of art is a prophetic loan, drawn on fugitive premises; the artist acts on it, and, presumably, sustains some faith that others will do so too, or at least could.”
― Lyn Hejinian, Tribunal

“Writing’s initial situation, its point of origin, is often character­ized and always complicated by opposing impulses in the writer and by a seeming dilemma that language creates and then cannot resolve. The writer experiences a conflict between a desire to sat­isfy a demand for boundedness, for containment and coherence, and a simultaneous desire for free, unhampered access to the world prompting a correspondingly open response to it. Curi­ously, the term inclusivity is applicable to both, though the connotative emphasis is different for each. The impulse to bounded­ness demands circumscription and that in turn requires that a dis­tinction be made between inside and outside, between the rele­vant and the (for the particular writing at hand) confusing and irrelevant—the meaningless. The desire for unhampered access and response to the world (an encyclopedic impulse), on the other hand, hates to leave anything out. The essential question here concerns the writer’s subject position.”
― Lyn Hejinian

“Allegories are told with a purpose whose possibility is lost
Until a potato-eater appears and eats potatoes

”
― Lyn Hejinian

“The sky was packed

which by appearing endless seems inevitable.
The flag droops straight down. The horse
in dry sand walks with a chirping noise
from friction of the particles
and counterarguments like pack ice
puff in the waves there, blowing fountains
of pearl. The ground.”
― Lyn Hejinian, The Cold of Poetry

“I am a stranger to the little girl I was, and more—more strange. But many facts about a life should be left out, they are easily replaced.”
― Lyn Hejinian, My Life

“Ambiguities everywhere should be collected as evidence of ambivalence.”
― Lyn Hejinian, Positions of the Sun

“With age one ought to gain something other than weight
Height
Adherence
There’s a lot of waiting in the drama of experience”
― Lyn Hejinian, Oxota: A Short Russian Novel

“But daily life and art occupy different space-times; a museum, a concert hall, a page of text, an art gallery are more likely to be experienced as refuges from daily life than as its venue.”
― Lyn Hejinian, Positions of the Sun

“Everything is a question of sleep," says Cocteau, but he forgets the shark, which does not. Anxiety is vigilant.”
― Lyn Hejinian, My Life

“The work of art offers an experience of contradictions and incommensurabilities – these are much better than truths.”
― Lyn Hejinian, Positions of the Sun

“Just as it is dreaming rather than the so-called latent (or repressed) content of a dream that harbors the dream‘s real mystery, and just as it is the social relations of production rather than the commodity they produce that remains in thrall to capitalism, so it is that the relationships and interactions of all the elements of a work of art hold its meaning. (…) The work of art offers an experience of contradictions and incommensurabilities – these are much better than truths.”
― Lyn Hejinian, Positions of the Sun

“The work of art offers an experience of contradictions
and incommensurabilities – these are much better than truths.”
― Lyn Hejinian, Positions of the Sun

“Long time lines trail behind every idea, object, person, pet, vehicle, and event.”
― Lyn Hejinian, My Life