Ben Marcus Quotes

33 quotes in 602 categories

• Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.
• A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.
• Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.
• People are considered as areas that resist light, mistakes in the air, collision sweet spots. At the time of this writing, the whole world is…
• To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can…
• Slamming the book shut produces a wind on the face, a weather that is copyrighted by the author, and this wind may not be deployed…
• Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there's nothing to be done about them.
• Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of…
• RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds…
• Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.
• Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I'd said that, how many times I'd meant it, how many times Claire…
• Being with him was like being alone underwater - everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold…
• A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
• Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.
• Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.
• I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.
• I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.
• It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.
• Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.
• My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

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