Ben Marcus Quotes & Sayings

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 had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry. — Ben Marcus

My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives. — 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 situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that. — Ben Marcus

In a perfect world the current laws would not apply. — Ben Marcus

It was so easy to agree to what did not test us. — Ben Marcus

My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else. — Ben Marcus

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

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

Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren't. — Ben Marcus

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

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

...identity compromises (relationships) may result... — Ben Marcus

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

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 muscle. (What a relief to be told there's no need to bother with a book that might seem thorny, or abstract, or unusual.) The elitists are the ones who become angry when it is suggested to them that a book with low sales might actually deserve a prize ( ... ) and readers were assured that the low sales figures for some of the titles could only mean that the books had failed our culture's single meaningful literary test. — Ben Marcus

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

How did one even fraternize with people who could not entertain vivid scenarios of self-mutilation? How was the sexual act even possible if one's partner could not entertain being crushed under a truck, just as a cathartic exercise? What important piece of her brain was missing that deprived her of such, well, deeply necessary acts of physical editing? — Ben Marcus

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

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

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

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

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

I recalled a sermon Burke had delivered months ago, when everything from the Jew hole was still safely abstract, wisdom I could enjoy in the unactionable pit of my mind. They will sniff at your legs, went Burke's sermon. They will wish they were you. Beware the man on his knees, the display of weakness. But the sermon had not passed through the radio coherently that day; static cloaked the transmission. Every other word was weakness, as if the broadcast were looping by mistake. We were to fear weakness not in oneself, where it should be cherished, but in others. Or not fear it, but mistrust it. We too easily believe in the trouble of others, erect a machinery of caring. Look through the story at the teller's need, was the caution. Share not your full story, went the warning. — Ben Marcus

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 and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming. — Ben Marcus

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

Maybe this was the quiet before the real fucking quiet. — Ben Marcus

There would be people answering to names they did not deserve. It would hurt to say their names. I would head upstairs and crack the seal on a jar of tomorrow's water, next week's water, next year's thin, sweet water
going as far ahead into the future as I could, until the water was barely there, clear and weak and airy
and I would commence a fine, hard drinking spell, until this whole day, and the days before it, and then the people in those days and myself entirely, and my hard, dead name turned into a slick wire that pulled farther and farther away from me, slipping finally from view as I filled myself, as I took in enough water to make myself forever new to the small world that held me. — Ben Marcus

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

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail. — Ben Marcus

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

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

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

Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one's hands free of another man's throat, free of one's own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too long in the elements. Gummed now, rusted, bloodless.
I forget who said it and I no longer care. — Ben Marcus

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 the surface, and other times the language is congested in order to fire up strong sensations. Accessibility is such a strange, sad measure of the writing I love. Dora the Explorer is accessible. The Unconsoled is not. But I have never been deliberately difficult, if that's what you're getting at. That has no appeal to me. I've always tried to write the fiction that compels me the most - I have to feel passionate, engaged, and nearly desperate if I'm going to get anything done. When I'm working on material that is conceptual or abstract or in some way difficult, I strive for clarity, transparency, a vivid attack. — 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, can die without being misunderstood. — Ben Marcus

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

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. — 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 stand firm, crouch, square off, meet an attack with something like resistance, even if it kills them. — Ben Marcus

Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback. — Ben Marcus

It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that should flow with thunderous force between the bodies of people so bonded. We should have been able to bypass a mere inability to exchange language. — Ben Marcus

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

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

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

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

why do you think poseurs pose? Because they want to be invited to the dominion of the real, an almost magical zone of unselfed sensation, and they know their very desire for it disqualifies them. Consider that, the next time you cluck your tongue at some awful, grandiose fake. Dude just wants to feel. — Ben Marcus

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

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same. — Ben Marcus

Oh, don't worry, I am perfectly aware of the fantasy involved here, but what we want is almost never exempt from the impossible. That barrier has very little meaning for me these days. Given what's happened, the impossible is just a blind spot that dissolves if we move our heads fast enough. History seems to show that the impossible is probably the most likely thing of all. — Ben Marcus

Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while. — Ben Marcus

The task of being right is a task the father perfects over time. — Ben Marcus

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

If only my head were finally not my responsibility, could be put into someone else's care, could be made to merge with other persons and the world so that it would no longer suffer such distance and touchlessness, would no longer even be a head, because even when touched, there are parts of my head not being touched. Even underwater parts of my head feel dry. — 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 admission of unknowability. — Ben Marcus

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

Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there's nothing to be done about them. — Ben Marcus

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

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

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

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

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

Something struck us as wrong, which only meant that we had not thought of it ourselves. — Ben Marcus

Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks. — Ben Marcus

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy from (wife) within the household's walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction need to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new. — Ben Marcus

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

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 a crime scene: People eat space with their bodies; they are rain decayers; the wind is slaughtered when they move. A retaliation is probably coming. Should a person cease to move, she would cease to kill the sky, and the world might begin to recover. — Ben Marcus

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

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

Like most doctors, the fanciest ones, he seemed offensively healthy, as if he kept the real secret of vitality to himself. He would live forever and people would crumble and die around him. You were supposed to feel like death after seeing him, in terms of your complexion, your posture, your whole body. If necessary, this doctor would eat you to survive. — Ben Marcus

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

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

, 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

Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children. — Ben Marcus

Sometimes I worry, for myself, that I've stopped being amazed at certain things, or I've taken for granted a set of ideas about how the world works, what people are doing with each other or alone, all the fundamental relationships in the world. I worry that I start taking it for granted and stop feeling the intensity of it because of language. Language starts to shut down the strength and power and strangeness of what it means to be a person in the world. — Ben Marcus

Anyone who believes that you can make art from language is part of a small, nearly-vanishing community, and we should all form a wedge and march on the enemy. Do we need different uniforms in this struggle, different stripes on our arms so that it's clear who the realists are? Maybe, but I care less and less. — Ben Marcus

We can contain such secret misery, perversion. — Ben Marcus

Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it. — Ben Marcus

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