Quotes from James Marcus

We were a religious sect consisting of two people, and now half the congregation was gone. There would be no closure, no healing. I would simply adjust myself to a new and severely depleted reality. The world would come to an end, as it always does, one world at a time.

Online magazines such as Salon, Slate, and Suck, had already made an elementary discovery: a reader staring into the equivalent of a thirty-watt bulb didn't want to confront thousands of words. The medium required a little extra white space, a sort of oasis for the optic nerve.

Optimists are the least prepared for the loss of hope.

Everything I have described so far seems to have happened to somebody else—to somebody else's father. But the death of a parent happens to you, and, once it starts, it never stops. It dislodges everything.

I'm good with machines. I know where to scratch, pet, and tickle them.

Some say vegetarianism is an alternative diet, but it is the original diet, the plan designed by God.

Spaying is a compromise in terms of reverence for life, but perhaps a necessary one in a society which kills millions of dogs and cats a year in "animal shelters".