"Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth."
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Quote collection
Ben Marcus quotes (page 1 of 3)
41 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability."
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"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."
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"Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there's nothing to be done about them."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"With students, one is often in the position where you have to be authoritative about what they're doing and connected to some principle. I prefer not really knowing the answer to anything interesting and I try to encourage that in teaching. If I start to feel certain about something my curiosity goes away, my mind shuts down. I'm sure that's not always true, it's stupid to generalise."
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"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."
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"Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks."
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"When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level."
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"Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise."
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"Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children."
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"I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard."
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"I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow."
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"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."
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"A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it."
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"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."
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