Quotes from 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.

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Maybe this was the quiet before the real fucking quiet.

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 ?

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

A short story works to remind us that if we are not sometimes baffled and amazed and undone by the world around us, rendered speechless and stunned, perhaps we are not paying close enough attention.

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 .

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.