Ben Marcus Quotes

#1. Ben Marcus has created an innovative and unflinching portrait of the turmoil of the human condition, providing the reader a most rare gift: something truly new. Notable American Women contains strains of Donald Antrim and Samuel Beckett but is beholden to neither; it is a brave, original book.

Myla Goldberg

#2. Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren't.

Ben Marcus

#3. Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.

Ben Marcus

#4. What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?

Ben Marcus

#5. Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

Ben Marcus

#6. Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.

Ben Marcus

#7. I work, and then I leave the office, and I'm with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don't feel like I'm exorcising my own deep ideas about parenthood and about how my life will come into play in my work.

Ben Marcus

#8. I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

Ben Marcus

#9. In a perfect world the current laws would not apply.

Ben Marcus

#10. It was hard not to realize what kind of kid his parents wished they'd had, and when he thought about that kind of kid it was tempting for Paul to want to track, hunt, and eat the little thing.

Ben Marcus

#11. When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

Ben Marcus

#12. I needed my daughter to disappear from my sight. If I could have had a wish, I would have wished her away.

Ben Marcus

#13. ...identity compromises (relationships) may result...

Ben Marcus

#14. It's lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I've made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There's joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it's not yours.

Ben Marcus

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

Ben Marcus

#16. 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.

Ben Marcus

#17. A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

Ben Marcus

#18. 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 without permission, nor may the pages be turned without express written permission.

Ben Marcus

#19. I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.

Ben Marcus

#20. I would like to outsmart the role that is destined for me. But I can't. I have failed to destroy my category.

Ben Marcus

#21. The other kids formed a roving pack, moving like one of those clusters of birds that seem to share a single, frantic brain.

Ben Marcus

#22. Something struck us as wrong, which only meant that we had not thought of it ourselves.

Ben Marcus

#23. He had seemed daunting when I first saw him off the trail, hulking over the Jewish couple as if he might carve into their backs and eat them. Now

Ben Marcus

#24. Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.

Ben Marcus

#25. Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.

Ben Marcus

#26. I prefer men who don't fall down and weep, who absorb a blow, who do not scamper and yell when chased, but stand firm, crouch, square off, meet an attack with something like resistance, even if it kills them.

Ben Marcus

#27. 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 what people need.

Ben Marcus

#28. In certain strains of Judaism, there's a profound passion for the ineffable. Contemplation of God is meant to be forever elusive, because, you know, our tiny minds can't possibly comprehend Him. If we find ourselves comprehending Him, then we can be sure we're off track.

Ben Marcus

#29. We shared a daughter? I'd not thought about it that way before. If we shared a daughter, and something happened to Claire, then I would not have to hare Esther with her anymore. I would have Esther to myself.

Ben Marcus

#30. Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.

Ben Marcus

#31. Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.

Ben Marcus

#32. A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.

Ben Marcus

#33. Mostly we're motivated to control ourselves in public. Mostly. At home the motivation is much less clear. At home there's a bit of a lab for bad behavior. You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.

Ben Marcus

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

Ben Marcus

#35. We can contain such secret misery, perversion.

Ben Marcus

#36. Thomas's mistake, like most of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that.

Ben Marcus

#37. The task of being right is a task the father perfects over time.

Ben Marcus

#38. When men cough or talk into their own hands, they are praying to their own bones, hoping to change their minds about something.

Ben Marcus

#39. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? How about this: I lost without the love. I've lost things I've never even had. A whole life.

Ben Marcus

#40. I'm interested in the hope we invest in science, and the disappointment we can feel when science flattens, or 'explains,' the larger mysteries of religion.

Ben Marcus

#41. Maybe this was the quiet before the real fucking quiet.

Ben Marcus

#42. It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.

Ben Marcus

#43. Being with him was like being alone underwater
everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced.

Ben Marcus

#44. Baby talk has tremendous potential, despite its obvious dangers and its near-total incomprehensibility. The only reason you don't embrace it is your abject terror.

Ben Marcus

#45. My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.

Ben Marcus

#46. Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there's nothing to be done about them.

Ben Marcus

#47. , and he told a story once after intercourse, to the person who had just politely hoisted him while he hyperventilated in their space until his error had been registered as a small dollop of fluid he extruded from his mistake zone, ...

Ben Marcus

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

Ben Marcus

#49. My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else.

Ben Marcus

#50. If the words of this book are misspelled, but accidentally spell other words correctly, and also accidentally fall into a grammatically coherent arrangement, where coherency is defined as whatever doesn't upset people, it means this book is legally another book, and not this book.

Ben Marcus

#51. These people who were supposed to be my family, who had conspired to look enough like me to serve as a critique of my appearance ...

Ben Marcus

#52. My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

Ben Marcus

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

Ben Marcus

#54. Perhaps they didn't know they were at sea. Was there a certain percentage of people at sea who lacked the knowledge that they were at sea?

Ben Marcus

#55. Until the notion of Helmet-Assisted Life catches on with more people, you may be seen as a threat if you wear a helmet during moments of intimacy. Yet it might also be true that relaxed intimacy cannot occur unless the head is fully protected.

Ben Marcus

#56. I'm an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard's books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work - the pursuit of darkness, the negative - and I think in some sense I've internalised that as what one is supposed to do.

Ben Marcus

#57. The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can't just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.

Ben Marcus

#58. 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 die without being misunderstood.

Ben Marcus

#59. It was so easy to agree to what did not test us.

Ben Marcus

#60. Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out ...

Ben Marcus

#61. When a man modifies or adorns a woman's name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite less than herself.

Ben Marcus

#62. Spelling a person's name is the first step toward killing him. It takes him apart and empties him of meaning. This is why God is afraid to have his name spelled.

Ben Marcus

#63. In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

Ben Marcus

#64. Families necessitate energetic concealment of the obvious, to be plain about it. To be in a family is to work strenuously to suppress the truth, for reasons I cannot determine, and the shadow, when it came, caused competing strategies in the family I occupied.

Ben Marcus

#65. The Living: Those members, persons, and items that still appear to engage their hands into what is hot, what is rubbery, what cannot be seen or lifted

Ben Marcus