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Leaving the Sea: Stories QUOTES

Leaving the Sea: Stories QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else. "

― Ben Marcus , Leaving the Sea: Stories

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

― Ben Marcus , Leaving the Sea: Stories

4 " 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 , Leaving the Sea: Stories

5 " 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 , Leaving the Sea: Stories

6 " Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren't. "

― Ben Marcus , Leaving the Sea: Stories

7 " Thomas's mistake, like most of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that. "

― Ben Marcus , Leaving the Sea: Stories

8 " Families necessitate energetic concealment of the obvious, to be plain about it. To be in a family is to work strenuously to suppress the truth, for reasons I cannot determine, and the shadow, when it came, caused competing strategies in the family I occupied. "

― Ben Marcus , Leaving the Sea: Stories

9 " 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. "

― Ben Marcus , Leaving the Sea: Stories

10 " ...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... "

― Ben Marcus , Leaving the Sea: Stories

11 " When men cough or talk into their own hands, they are praying to their own bones, hoping to change their minds about something. "

― Ben Marcus , Leaving the Sea: Stories

12 " The colleague, no doubt, was not a connoisseur of the self-punishment, sad to think. This type of hygiene was foreign to her, no doubt. 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, even as a cathartic exercise? "

― Ben Marcus , Leaving the Sea: Stories

13 " Loud people have thin, hollow bones. They can be broken in half and discarded into a pit. They snap as easily as children do, but they will not burn as long in a fire. If a loud person tries to store his voice in a jar, he will not be able to, unless the jar is a mouth worn on the face of someone in his family, which he must prize open with his fingers while shouting deep into the hole there. "

― Ben Marcus , Leaving the Sea: Stories

14 " Had anyone, he wondered, ever studied the biology of being seen? The ravaging, the way it literally burned when you fetched up in someone's sight line and they took aim at you with their minds? He wanted to summon a look of kindness in return, a look that might forgive his miserly ways, his trespass on their ancient, superior city. But his face, as no one had ever needed to tell him, lacked the power to convey. He'd stopped trying to use it for silent communication, the semaphore you performed overseas, absent a shared language, to suggest you were not a murderer. Such facial language was for apes, or some mime troupe in Vermont. Mummenschanz people who emoted for a living. He ate with his face and spoke with it. Sometimes he hid it in his hands. That should have been enough. "

― Ben Marcus , Leaving the Sea: Stories

15 " This first. To understand this. Then maybe."
Julian was impressed. The doctor had devised a pretty good tombstone.
This first. To understand this. Then maybe. "

― Ben Marcus , Leaving the Sea: Stories

16 " In Germany, they treated you with yourself. You were guilty of hiding you own cure inside of you, you selfish fuck. "

― Ben Marcus , Leaving the Sea: Stories