Home > Author > Ben Marcus
1 " 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 , Notable American Women
2 " 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. "
3 " Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it. "
― Ben Marcus , The Flame Alphabet
4 " What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides? "
5 " 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 , Leaving the Sea: Stories
6 " I would like to outsmart the role that is destined for me. But I can't. I have failed to destroy my category. "
7 " Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out … "
― Ben Marcus
8 " 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. "
9 " 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. "
10 " 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. "
11 " Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while. "
12 " My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else. "
13 " A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it. "
14 " A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail. "
15 " 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. "
16 " Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback. "
17 " 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. "
18 " 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? "
19 " 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. "
20 " The task of being right is a task the father perfects over time. "
