Ben Marcus

To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to…

— Ben Marcus

My goal, with whatever I'm working on, is to lose track of time.

— Ben Marcus

“..., and he told a story once after intercourse, to the person who had just politely hoisted him while he hyperventilated in…

— Ben Marcus

“Terms BEN MARCUS, THE 1. False map, scroll, caul, or parchment. It is comprised of the first skin. In ancient times, it…

— Ben Marcus

“We can contain such secret misery, perversion.”

— Ben Marcus

“Loud people have thin, hollow bones. They can be broken in half and discarded into a pit. They snap as easily as…

— Ben Marcus

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

— Ben Marcus

“This first. To understand this. Then maybe." Julian was impressed. The doctor had devised a pretty good tombstone. This first. To understand…

— Ben Marcus

“Who is setting the bar for what you call accessibility? The definition of “accessible” is “easy to understand,” and so much of…

— Ben Marcus

“People are considered as areas that resist light, mistakes in the air, collision sweet spots.”

— Ben Marcus

“The true elitists in the literary world are the ones who have become annoyed by literary ambition in any form, who have…

— Ben Marcus

“Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while.”

— Ben Marcus

“I prefer men who don't fall down and weep, who absorb a blow, who do not scamper and yell when chased, but…

— Ben Marcus

I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.

— Ben Marcus

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its…

— Ben Marcus

“What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our…

— Ben Marcus

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer,…

— Ben Marcus

“Until the notion of Helmet-Assisted Life catches on with more people, you may be seen as a threat if you wear a…

— Ben Marcus

Being with him was like being alone underwater - everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel…

— Ben Marcus

The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this…

— Ben Marcus

“It was hard not to realize what kind of kid his parents wished they'd had, and when he thought about that kind…

— Ben Marcus

“Thomas's mistake, like most of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a…

— Ben Marcus

I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to…

— Ben Marcus

“The colleague, no doubt, was not a connoisseur of the self-punishment, sad to think. This type of hygiene was foreign to her,…

— Ben Marcus

“The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have…

— Ben Marcus