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Categories Quote by Ben Marcus

““The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue.””

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Categories Labels Language Mediocrity Names Naming Originality

More by Ben Marcus

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

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

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

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“Terms BEN MARCUS, THE 1. False map, scroll, caul, or parchment. It is comprised of the first skin. In ancient times, it hung from a pole, where wind and birds inscribed its surface. Every year, it was lowered and the engravings and dents that the wind had introduced were studied. It can be large, although often it is tiny and…

“We can contain such secret misery, perversion.”

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“Loud people have thin, hollow bones. They can be broken in half and discarded into a pit. They snap as easily as children do, but they will not burn as long in a fire. If a loud person tries to store his voice in a jar, he will not be able to, unless the jar is a mouth worn on…

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

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

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“Who is setting the bar for what you call accessibility? The definition of “accessible” is “easy to understand,” and so much of the fiction I love is just… not that. It is complex and rich and sometimes puzzling, and it stays with me precisely because I can’t quite wrap my head around it. Sometimes it is lucid and approachable on…

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

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“The true elitists in the literary world are the ones who have become annoyed by literary ambition in any form, who have converted the very meaning of ambition so totally that it now registers as an act of disdain, a hostility to the poor common reader, who should never be asked to do anything that might lead to a pulled…

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

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More Categories quotes

...the number of saintly men has not yet risen to the level where the census makes them a separate statistical category.

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As a politician - particularly as a politician in a coalition - you quickly realise that compromise is a part of the game. But…

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I've worked with jazz artists, country artists, classical artists, pop artists. I never wanted there to be categories, because when I was a kid…

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I don't think in national categories. For me it [policy] is about concepts and substance.

Jean-Claude Juncker

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Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species- back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire has been ethically ambiguous. If you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play. I…

We don't need to complicate all the "reasons" behind our emotions. It's much simpler than that. Two categories .. good feelings, bad feelings.

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I put the truth out there, I put the historical facts into Hip Hop to show us how much history repeats itself and that…

Immortal Technique

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I am devoting my lecture in this seminar to a discussion of the possibility that we are now entering a Jewish century, a time when the spirit of the community, the non-ideological blend of the emotional and rational and the resistance to categories and forms will emerge through the forces of anti-nationalism to provide us with a new kind of…

Martin A. Siegel

A top World War II ace once said that fighter pilots fall into two broad categories: those who go out to kill and those…

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No, I don't like legend. I mean, I don't like the category. And to begin with, to me, a legend is something that is…

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I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are very urgent…

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... the notions category and functor were not formulated or put in print until the idea of a natural transformation was also at hand.

Saunders Mac Lane

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