Quotes from 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.

Whom do we speak to, and how do we encode our messages? How can we be heard or read, even after we are dead?

Throughout history libraries have testified to what a civilization meant, or wanted to believe it meant.

To keep a story on a shelf or to remember then retell it means that it will be more likely to exist to those who come after we have gone.

While you can't hold on to everything forever, you're a fool if you sell back your college books at semester's end: have you learned nothing of this life?

I suspect you knew: to live is to be irradiated. It is a sacrifice, this life.

Does our reading life balance or subvert our waking life?

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 can't 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. It's not enough to hunt or haunt our parents' hearts; we must occupy our own.

Who taught you to swear first? Who burst your head wide open with a sentence? Whose linguistic tics have you ingested, do you know, bust out without thinking

Ask kin-tsugi, the Japanese art of "golden joinery," in which a broken bowl is fixed and seamed with glow, cracks to the forefront, filled in by gold, rendering the repaired thing more remarkable, honoring its shatter. The result is neither broken nor unbroken, but both at once, shadow, object, corona around an eclipsed sun. Own the ways we break, it seems to say: understand that the fault lines of a mind or body are individual, and honor them.

Like mirror script, to read requires reflection, asks us to see ourselves holding the page.

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

While you can't hold on to everything forever, you're a fool if you sell back your college books at semester's end: have you learned nothing of this life?