Ben Marcus Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Ben Marcus

  Sweet, Mistake, Rain

  Ben Marcus (2007). “Notable American Women: A Novel”, p.46, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

• Slamming the book shut produces a wind on the face, a weather that is copyrighted by the author, and this wind may not be deployed without permission, nor may the pages be turned without express written permission.

  Ben Marcus

  Book, Wind, Weather

  Ben Marcus (2007). “Notable American Women: A Novel”, p.54, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

• RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.

  Ben Marcus

  Wise, Art, Pain

  Ben Marcus (2013). “The Age of Wire and String”, p.92, Granta Books

  4 Copy quote

• Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.

  Ben Marcus

  Long, Suspense, Care

  Ben Marcus (2012). “The Flame Alphabet”, p.269, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Love, Sorry, Impact

  Ben Marcus (2012). “The Flame Alphabet”, p.112, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Hands, Long

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Ben Marcus

  Love, Like Being Alone, Underwater

  Ben Marcus (2007). “Notable American Women: A Novel”, p.34, Vintage

  16 Copy quote

• My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

  Ben Marcus

  Book, Age, Wire

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Embrace, Judaism, Complexity

  4 Copy quote

• I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.

  Ben Marcus

  Thinking, Way

  4 Copy quote

• I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

  Ben Marcus

  Grief, Bigs, Dose

  4 Copy quote

• Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.

  Ben Marcus

  Children, Fiction, Faces

  "Ben Marcus: 'Writing has to earn people's interest'". Interview with Killian Fox, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

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

  Ben Marcus

  Self, Body, Sometimes

  Ben Marcus (2014). “Leaving the Sea”, p.50, Granta Books

  4 Copy quote

• I don't like real places, but I don't like imagined ones either. I feel like I'm looking for some mixture and it's very hard for me to say because I like to use real place names because there's an uncanny feeling to them, but at the same time I don't ever really try to make them plausible. Sometimes I like to use them as a way to hide in plain sight a little bit, because to me a very exotic or imagined setting has a lot of weight and a lot of burden to it, and it doesn't suit me, but a real place seems to have its own weird legacy, so I don't know what the choice is?

  Ben Marcus

  Real, Choices, Feelings

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Ben Marcus

  Stupid, Teaching, Interesting

  4 Copy quote

• To me one of the amazing technologies of writing is the way it can listen in on thoughts. I don't feel that that's natural to other art forms in the same way.

  Ben Marcus

  Art, Writing, Technology

  4 Copy quote

Page 2 of 2

First

← Prev

1

2

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin