“ 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
“ 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 ac… Ben Marcus
“ 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 t… Ben Marcus
“ Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren't. Ben Marcus
“ To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood. Ben Marcus
“ 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 s… Ben Marcus
“ 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, a… Ben Marcus
“ 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
“ 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 sho… Ben Marcus
“ Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback. Ben Marcus
“ 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… Ben Marcus
“ 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) w… Ben Marcus
“ A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail. Ben Marcus
“ A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it. Ben Marcus
“ My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else. Ben Marcus
“ Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while. Ben Marcus
“ 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 kil… Ben Marcus
“ 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… Ben Marcus
“ Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out … Ben Marcus
