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Top Ben Marcus Quotes

Browse top 34 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Ben Marcus.

Favorite Ben Marcus Quotes

1. "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
2. "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
3. "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
4. "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
5. "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.- http://www.williamgaddis.org/marcus.pdf" ~ Ben Marcus
6. "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
7. "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
8. "A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail." ~ Ben Marcus
9. "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
10. "A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it." ~ Ben Marcus
11. "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
12. "Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise." ~ Ben Marcus
13. "Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children." ~ Ben Marcus
14. "I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard." ~ Ben Marcus
15. "I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow." ~ Ben Marcus
16. "It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability." ~ Ben Marcus
17. "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
18. "My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all." ~ Ben Marcus
19. "My goal, with whatever I'm working on, is to lose track of time." ~ Ben Marcus
20. "Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren't." ~ Ben Marcus
21. "Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback." ~ Ben Marcus
22. "My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives." ~ Ben Marcus
23. "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
24. "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
25. "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
26. "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
27. "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
28. "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
29. "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
30. "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
31. "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
32. "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
33. "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
34. "Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it." ~ Ben Marcus

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Today's Quote

You can have your own watch and always doubt it. If I had a watch I'd probably always be doubting it or the batteries would be dying. I just know that people always have trouble with their watches, and that's why I like public clocks."
Author: Ben Katchor

What Did Ben Marcus Talk About?

Thin
Wit
Here
Hen
Lit
Rent
Per
Act
Era
Con
Ours
Self
Sure
Pen
Ally
Mean
Low
Less
Use
Kid
Hey
Thou
Ten
Sing
Sin
Fan
Seem
Bit
Read
Rate
Boo
Parents
Book
Care
Kids
Off

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