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41 " At some difficult-to-determine point, among middle-class white boys in the Middle West, fights, instead of ending when a combatant hit the ground, took on new life there, the “boys will be boys” chivalry of boxing giving way to the archaic regression of overkill, a term that dates from 1946; every opponent must be spread; every offense, however minor, leads to holocaust. "
― Ben Lerner , The Topeka School
42 " one I had— The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you. A fiction you’d forgotten was there. "
43 " the abyss of non-belief, the vacuum, cannot be filled with stuff "
44 " familiar with the “fine print” one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with those thousands of words was comprehend them. "
45 " he passed, as he often passed, a mysterious threshold. He began to feel less like he was delivering a speech and more like a speech was delivering him, that the rhythm and intonation of his presentation were beginning to dictate its content, that he no longer had to organize his arguments so much as let them flow through him. "
46 " he was nevertheless more in the realm of poetry than of prose, his speech stretched by speed and intensity until he felt its referential meaning dissolve into pure form. "
47 " They felt at once profoundly numb and profoundly ecstatic to be young and inflicting optional damage on each other; "
48 " It’s like there is a video game inside his head except what happens there will happen here. "
49 " Sima made a space for me to hear that there were depths beneath what I was saying that I hadn't sounded yet. "
50 " There was some kind of special power involved in repurposing language, redistributing the voices, changing the principle of patterning, faint sparks of alternative meaning in the shadow of the original sense, the narrative. "
51 " But there are no grown-ups; that’s what you must grow up to know fully. "
52 " The opposite of a truth,” Klaus quoted, “is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth”—pause for emphasis, sound of sprinklers, insects, push mowers, felt absence of city noise, Kenny Rogers from a passing car—“may be another profound truth. "
53 " the more profound the statement, the more reversible; the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed, just as there is no principle of noncontradiction, no law of excluded middle, governing the unconscious. Then, briefly serious, Klaus would touch my shoulder: A quote like that can save your life. "
54 " If he had the language, he wouldn’t express himself with symptoms. "
55 " Klaus’s charm, at least for me, was that his voice already sounded like an imitation of itself; Klaus was an actor bemused to be playing Klaus. And yet the effect of this doubling was generous, self-deprecating; "
56 " Others began soliciting speech from him, where did you buy those awesome boots, is that a hickey or a bruise, do you still practice martial arts? "
