Quotes from Ben Marcus

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

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

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

Pattern was a family name belonging to their great-grandmother, who lived on a brutally cold little island, and who, according to their mother, had made a sport of surviving terminal illnesses.

We can contain such secret misery, perversion.

James shows his feelings so liberally that they come at a discount, and their value diminishes. When he says he loves me, usually in a threatening way, the statement always seems to beg for reciprocation. I guess he cries wolf. More or less sobs it. One could argue that everything James says is merely the word "wolf" in one language or another.

Knowledge is many things, but it definitely is not power. "Dread" is a better word for it, I think, though I do understand how that ultimately fails as a slogan.

We eat in silence, listening to the rain. Both of us look forlornly at the bar, thinking that we shouldn't, we mustn't. On the other hand, we could simply pass out drunk here and maybe they'd take us to jail. There are beds in jail. Soap. New people to meet.

with is arms heavy-light from having just bench-press three hundred pounds...

Some creatures have a low survival rate, and so the world produces far too many of them, and as they fight among each other to live they grow more savage, more base, more dull, and the winners, the survivors, are distinctly unappealing little beings.

Everyone always says, 'Don't you want to see the baby, don't you want to see the baby,' but if I did want to see a fat, bald, confused person, obviously I'd have only to look in the mirror.

The sign red "Sky and Celery." Closer, it read "Ski and Cyclery.

Do. You. Ever. Feel. Guilty." He smiled. "Doesn't everybody?

Lots of people have been touched by Jesus. But I have been touched by God.

The sun gets better at setting.

I am bleeding to death. It doesn't hurt at all.

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.

There were stories in the territory, stories that could turn a sane man sour and a sour man worse.

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...

Mayflower Systems regularly bought and destroyed small companies, mostly to crush progress. And maybe also simply to frighten the universe and increase world sadness?

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.

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

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

In a perfect world the current laws would not apply.