Lerner Quotes & Sayings

When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books. — Betsy Lerner

Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted. — Max Lerner

Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others. — Harriet Lerner

I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations and I have not provided false information to this or any other committee. — Lois Lerner

Our society cultivates guilt feelings in women such that many of us still feel guilty if we are anything less than an emotional service station to others. — Harriet Lerner

America shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas it calls him a foreigner. — Max Lerner

Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall. — Max Lerner

Pseudoscience often relies on a witches' brew of scientific terms (e.g. "wavelength," "energy fields," "vibrations") half-baked into simplistic metaphors that do not correspond with testable reality. In some cases, pseudoscience simply relies on language that is deliberately vague and poorly defined to deceive. While outright lunacy is almost always easy to spot, the most dangerous of pseudoscientific meanderings are those filled with scientific terminology that, even for experts, can initially be daunting and impressive. Upon dissection, however, the terminology is invariably found to be misused, or used in a context far from accepted understanding. However convincing and artful, however much we may even wish the conclusions to be true, monuments built in such shifting sands cannot withstand the inevitable tests of time. — K. Lee Lerner

There's a widespread belief that if you have solid self-esteem you don't need outside affirmation and praise. This is patently untrue, by the way. — Harriet Lerner

I want a life of good sport, good people and the competition that goes with it. — Randy Lerner

No one will ever believe that both your hard drive and mine crashed within a week of each other, — Lois Lerner

Happily, researchphilia is not the problem it once was. The Internet makes just-in-time research very practical. — Edward M. Lerner

Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms. — Ben Lerner

I had the endless day, months and months of endless days, and yet my return date bounded this sense of boundlessness, kept it from becoming threatening. — Ben Lerner

Curitiba is not a paradise. We have all the problems that most Latin American cities have. We have slums. We have the same difficulties, but the big difference is the respect given by people due to the quality of the services which are provided. — Jaime Lerner

Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change. — Harriet Lerner

I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from? The desire to destroy myself? This last depression had scared me. It had come on so quickly, not like the gradual woolgathering in my brain I had known before. — Betsy Lerner

Nothing was a more powerful compass of my mood or a better indication of my self-worth than the number on the scale. — Betsy Lerner

Winning supporters over can only really be achieved by what you do, not what you say. It's no use just smiling and shaking hands and getting quoted with witty one-liners. — Randy Lerner

Pseudoscience is almost always recognizable from a distance, and easy to confirm on close examination. Science is, however, not immune from hubris, and bad science can be tougher to spot. Those of us who make a living from science or science media must display scientific integrity. We must constantly test our assumptions and fight the siren song of consensus when our data tells us to be contrarian. We must remain independent of political or religious bias in evaluating our work. We must admit when we are wrong, and remain willing to evolve when verifiable data demands change. We must admit when we are uncertain, remain humble in advances, and offer courageous and independent advice grounded in science. — K. Lee Lerner

Secrets are my profession. I know them inside and out. What separates me from someone I'm lying to isn't the lie. It's that I know I'm lying. It's a pane of glass---they can't see it, but I don't forget it's there. — Rose Lerner

Love alone is never a good enough reason to marry. — Harriet Lerner

In 1903 the scientists found out that the brontosaurus was a fake! They realized that the brontosaurus was really an apatosaurus with the wrong head. However, although the scientists realized their mistake, most people didn't know about their new discovery. Many people thought that the brontosaurus still existed because museums kept using the name on their labels - and because the brontosaurus was really, really popular! So even though the scientists discovered their error, most of us didn't know. — Ben Lerner

Happy were the ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, ages of such perfect social integration that no drug was required to link the hero to the whole. — Ben Lerner

Yet all of us are vulnerable to intense, nonproductive angry reactions in our current relationships if we do not deal openly and directly with emotional issues from our first family - in particular, losses and cutoffs. — Harriet Lerner

What counted was not the facts but the fears. — Max Lerner

Some of the more fatuous flag-waving Americans are in danger of forgetting that you can't extract gratitude as you would extract a tooth; that unless friendship is freely given, it means nothing and less than nothing. — Max Lerner

Stay close to the young ... and a little rubs off. — Alan Jay Lerner

I like to think readers appreciate a well-drawn near-future as well as a well-drawn far-future. — Edward M. Lerner

All writers are like bomb-throwers, whether they attack with dense academic prose or jazzy riffs of stream-of-consciousness writing. — Betsy Lerner

If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first. — Harriet Lerner

The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life. — Betsy Lerner

Whether hunting is right or wrong, a spiritual experience, or an outlet for the killer instinct, one thing it is not is a sport. Sport is when individuals or teams compete against each other under equal circumstances to determine who is better at a given game or endeavor. Hunting will be a sport when deer, elk, bears, and ducks are ... given 12-gauge shotguns. Bet we'd see a lot fewer drunk yahoos (live ones, anyway) in the woods if that happened. — Richard Lerner

I breathed in the night air that was or was not laced with anachronistic blossoms and felt the small thrill I always felt to a lesser or greater degree when I looked at Manhattan's skyline and the innumerable illuminated windows and the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the FDR Drive and the present absence of the towers. — Ben Lerner

The amount of time that a young girl spends wearing pink will be inversely proportional to her future income. — Sandra Lerner

The Seven Deadly Sins of the Press: - Concentrated Power of the Big Press. - Passing of competition and the coming of monopoly. - Governmental control of the press. - Timidity, especially in the face of group and corporate pressures. - Big Business mentality. - Clannishness among the newspaper publishers that has prevented them from criticizing each other. - Social blindness. — Max Lerner

A religion which has lost its basic conviction about the interconnection of men with men in their common struggles for the human, will never command belief in the realm of the superhuman. — Max Lerner

When I was in graduate school in consumer science and math, all of the big companies had labs, all doing blue sky research. — Sandra Lerner

Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even or finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself. — Harriet Lerner

what fuels human unhappiness in both the personal and political realm can be boiled down to these three key emotions - anxiety, fear, and shame. — Harriet Lerner

Your interviews or blog posts or whatever are less supplements to your novel than part of it. I'm not private, but I believe in literary form - I'll use my life as material for art (I don't know how not to do this) and I'll use art as a way of exploring that passage of life into art and vice versa, but that's not the same thing as thinking that any of the details of my life are interesting or relevant on their own. — Ben Lerner

But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where "poem" is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality's unavailability. — Ben Lerner

Moving in this direction requires us to clarify - to ourselves and others - what's important to us. Having an authentic voice means that: We can openly share competence as well as problems and vulnerability. We can warm things up and calm them down. We can listen and ask questions that allow us to truly know the other person and to gather information about anything that may affect us. We can say what we think and feel, state differences, and allow the — Harriet Lerner

Feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard of motherhood. — Harriet Lerner

Maybe now if you're not an exhibitionist you're private. Or maybe it's just that for a lot of people - sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways - there's no division between the art object and what surrounds it. — Ben Lerner

We used to say that inside Cecil Beaton there was another Cecil Beaton sending out lots of little Cecils into the world. One did the sets, another did the costumes. A third took the photographs. Another put the sketches in an exhibition, then into magazines, then in a book. — Alan Jay Lerner

Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me. — Ben Lerner

Time travel offends our sense of cause and effect - but maybe the universe doesn't insist on cause and effect. — Edward M. Lerner

The nimble of mind long for the challenge of new discoveries. Weary minds cling to what is already known. — K. Lee Lerner

Differences don't just threaten and divide us. They also inform, enrich, and enliven us. — Harriet Lerner

If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak. — Ben Lerner

If you treat man as he appears to be, you make him worse than he is. But if you treat man as if he already were what he potentially could be, you make him what he should be. — Harriet Lerner

Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant of their own history [do] not know what women before them had thought and taught. So generation after generation, they [struggle] for insights others had already had before them, [resulting in] the constant inventing of the wheel. — Gerda Lerner

There is little in the architecture of a city that is more beautifully designed than a tree. — Jaime Lerner

Fear is a message - sometimes helpful, sometimes not - but often conveying critical information about our beliefs, our needs, and our relationship to the world around us. — Harriet Lerner

The human heart is like a big mess of embroidery silks, and the more you pull, the more they tangle. The thing is, the threads have only got one end, if that. You can't sort them all out into colors. You just pick the ones you want and hold one to them as best you can. — Rose Lerner

Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation. — Ben Lerner

What normally felt like the only possible world became one among many — Ben Lerner

Through words we come to know the other person
and to be known. This knowing is at the heart of our deepest longings for intimacy and connection with others. How relationships unfold with the most important people in our lives depends on courage and clarity in finding voice. — Harriet Lerner

The effect on men has been very bad, too, of the omission of women's history, because men have been given the impression that they're much more important in the world than they actually are. It has fostered illusions of grandeur in every man that are unwarranted. If you can think as a man that everything great in the world and its civilization was created by men, then naturally you have to look down on women. And naturally, you have to have different aspirations for your sons and for your daughters. — Gerda Lerner

The problem is that if you're self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn't something lost - some kind of presence? You're distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable. — Ben Lerner

We need to build millions of little moments of caring on an individual level. Indeed, as talk of a politics of meaning becomes more widespread, many people will feel it easier to publicly acknowledge their own spiritual and ethical aspirations and will allow themselves to give more space to their highest vision in their personal interactions with others. A politics of meaning is as much about these millions of small acts as it is about any larger change. The two necessarily go hand in hand. — Michael Lerner

While being in the right seat at the right game might create short-term reassurance, I can't get over the idea that really what people feel is that their club is being run by a group of guys who know the history, study the heritage and view Villa as a proud Victorian club in its third century. — Randy Lerner

How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me? — Ben Lerner

As long as we can feel hope, there is hope. — Harriet Lerner

Love wasn't selfless, and it wasn't selfish either. Love was equality. It was saying that another person's self was just as important as yours, and expecting them to feel the same way. — Rose Lerner

We need to hear the sound of our voice for what we think and need. — Harriet Lerner

I promised to pass through a series of worlds with you, I remembered from her vows. — Ben Lerner

Americans live in a twilight world between a sense of loss and a sense of resigned acceptance. — Max Lerner

My experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that's all I'd ever really wanted from my body, such as it was. — Ben Lerner

My debt to feminism is simply incalculable. Feminism allowed me to see past a 'reality' that I had once taken as a given. It helped me to pay attention to countless voices, my own included, that I had been taught 'don't count.' Feminism allows me to maintain hope. — Harriet Lerner

Winning our fans' approval will come from all of us doing the right things for the right reasons, me included. — Randy Lerner

Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs ... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others
into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one's future. — Gerda Lerner

I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the experiences themselves - might become material for art. This kind of transformation shows up a lot in 10:04 because the book tracks the transposition of fact into fiction in the New Yorker stor — Ben Lerner

I have a simple principle for the conduct of life- never to resist an adequate temptation. — Max Lerner

I could have danced all night! — Alan Jay Lerner

Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem - no such thing - a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean. — Ben Lerner

For boys, the family was the place from which one sprang and to which one returned for comfort and support, but the field of action was the larger world of wilderness, adventure, industry, labor, and politics. For girls, the family was to be the world, their field of action the domestic circle. He was to express himself in his work and, through it and social action, was to help transform his environment; her individual growth and choices were restricted to lead her to express herself through love, wifehood, and motherhood
through the support and nurture of others, who would act for her. — Gerda Lerner

A people's speech is the skin of its culture. — Max Lerner

When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing. — Gerda Lerner

When you are seventeen you aren't really serious. — Max Lerner

I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness. — Ben Lerner

All to often, however, what she [the woman] does want is the man she hopes she will make out of the man she already has. — Alan Jay Lerner

What is dangerous about tranquillizers is that whatever peace of mind they bring is a packaged peace of mind. Where you buy a pill and buy peace of mind with it, you get conditioned to cheap solutions instead of deep ones. — Max Lerner

Science itself is a humanist in the sense that it doesn't discriminate between human beings, but it is also morally neutral. It is no better or worse than the ethos with and for which it is used. — Max Lerner

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil. — Max Lerner

Tonight I see no spheres, but project myself
and gaze back, an important trick
because the goal is to be on both sides of the poem,
shuttling between the you and I. — Ben Lerner

I had officially joined the cacophony of sick mother fuckers. — Betsy Lerner

Being in touch with our bodies, or more accurately, being our bodies, is how we know what is true. Harriet — Harriet Lerner

For a painter, the Mecca of the world, for study, for inspiration and for living is here on this star called Paris. Just look at it, no wonder so many artists have come here and called it home. Brother, if you can't paint in Paris, you'd better give up and marry the boss's daughter. — Alan Jay Lerner

I could imagine it in a way that felt like remembering — Ben Lerner

You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace. — Max Lerner

Could anyone among us have an inkling or a clue
What magic feats or wizardry and voodoo you can do?
And who would ever guess what powers you possess
And who would not be stunned to see you prove
There's more to us than surgeons can remove
So much more than we ever knew
So much more were we born to do
Should you draw back the curtain, this I am certain
You'll be impressed with you — Alan Jay Lerner

Sometimes the media gives us the impression that we are terminal patients, because of problems of global warmth or the ozone layer. And the people, they don't understand that they can could change this situation for the better if they could act locally in a city. — Jaime Lerner

There is no place in a city that can't be better. There is no toad that can't be a princess, no frog that can't become a prince. — Jaime Lerner

I have come to know well that fates are fickle in the business of English football. And I feel that I have pushed mine well past the limit. — Randy Lerner

Many people value criticism in the early stage of a relationship, but become allergic to it over time. Remember this: No one can survive in a marriage (at least not happily) if they feel more judged than admired. Your partner won't make use of your constructive criticism if there's not a surrounding climate of admiration and respect. — Harriet Lerner

Nursing was regarded as simply an extension of the unpaid services performed by the housewife - a characteristic attitude that haunts the profession to this day. — Gerda Lerner

Marriage is the lightning rod that absorbs anxiety and stress from all other sources, past and present. When marriage has a firm foundation of solid friendship and mutual respect, it can tolerate a fair amount of raw emotion. A good fight can clear the air, and it's nice to know we can survive conflict and even learn from it. Many couples, however, get trapped in endless rounds of fighting and blaming that they don't know how to get out of. When fights go unchecked and unrepaired, they can eventually erode love and respect, which are the bedrock of any successful relationship. — Harriet Lerner

We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living. — Max Lerner