Lyn Hejinian Quotes

I was eventually to become one person, gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma.

To some extent, each sentence has to be the whole story.

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.

Drinking Shirley Temple with my Mary Janes on, let's say that every possibility waits

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Ambiguities everywhere should be collected as evidence of ambivalence.

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.

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.

With age one ought to gain something other than weight Height Adherence There’s a lot of waiting in the drama of experience

Long time lines trail behind every idea, object, person, pet, vehicle, and event.

Everything is a question of sleep," says Cocteau, but he forgets the shark, which does not. Anxiety is vigilant.

The work of art offers an experience of contradictions and incommensurabilities – these are much better than truths.

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.

The work of art offers an experience of contradictions and incommensurabilities – these are much better than truths.