Ben

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.”
― Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

“It is easy to find a logical and virtuous reason for not doing what you don’t want to do.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I could imagine it in a way that felt like remembering”
― Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station