Quotes by Ander Monson

To be alive is to be dizzy and not to know exactly where to go.

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that’s not the word.

While you cant hold on to everything forever, youre a fool if you sell back your college books at semesters end: have you learned nothing of this life?

Anything I run across can light up the circuitry of my brain, and set me on an adventure. To research strains of yeast; hiccup fetishists; the proper use of inverse, obverse, converse and reverse; the ratio of main narrative to tangent, of forward action to aside. What else do we do but quest, pursue meaning in the information wash? Where does that storm sewer opening from the river into the city’s underneath go to, anyhow? I grab a headlamp and head in. It’s long and low and dark and stinks and extends for miles. Underneath the city is another city. The one above begins to disappear. That’s what we’re after, isn’t it? To disappear? To venture into darkness, to let what we know or think we know recede for an hour, a day, a novel’s length, and see what meaning can be made of what remains?

We are all in wires, eventually, reduced to what we said, or didnt say, and what we wrote or didnt write, who loved or didnt love, or loved and lost and never told it except for writing in or to a book. We are all discarded, discordant, confusingly, and so I salute your bravery, book inscriber. Your heart is big enough for both of us, so that there is no room for mockery in me. Anyone willing to strip themselves this bare this fast this way deserves our breathlessness and our hearts attention. Lets spend an hour, then longer, in contemplation. If you open, open all the way, or as much as you can bear, or else theres nothing here at all.

Oh bell-dumb heart, it makes you a fool to think you were ever closer to opening up the world — to art, to breaking it apart — than those who came before. But knowing that cant make you read or breathe more slowly. Since when did you listen to anyone? To give up on motivation is to give up on the work we do with alphabet and light. Its not enough to hunt or haunt our parents hearts; we must occupy our own.