Lyn Hejinian Quotes & Sayings

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

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

The idea of the person enters poetics where art and reality, or intentionality and circumstance, meet. — Lyn Hejinian

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

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

This poem is one of a series, all of them elegiac in intention, and subject to the strange forces of mourning that let loose illogical developments, into impossible configurations of thought. The poem is built of non-sequiturs, because that's what's left in the wake of the death. We cannot follow the dead, whether they are persons or ideas. Instead we remain, but in a situation that, in their absence, makes no sense. — Lyn Hejinian

Putting facts by the thousands, into the world, the toes take off with an appealing squeak which the thumping heel follows confidentially, the way men greet men. Sometimes walking is just such elated pumping. — Lyn Hejinian

A fragment is not a fraction but a whole piece — Lyn Hejinian

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

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

The 'open text' often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers. — Lyn Hejinian