Quotes by Ben Marcus

About Ben Marcus:

Ben Marcus is the author of four books of fiction. His latest book, Leaving the Sea: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in January 2014.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?

Ben Marcus

Oh, don’t worry, I am perfectly aware of the fantasy involved here, but what we want is almost never exempt from the impossible. That barrier has very little meaning for me these days. Given what’s happened, is just a blind spot that dissolves if...

Ben Marcus

Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.

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 should flow with thunderous force between the bodies ...

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 myself.

Ben Marcus

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. W...

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, as someone said, gone too long in the element...

Ben Marcus

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

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

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

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) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow...

Ben Marcus

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

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 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

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....

Ben Marcus

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

Ben Marcus

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

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 supposed to feel like death after seeing him, in te...

Ben Marcus

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

Ben Marcus

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.

Ben Marcus

Author Bio

  • NameBen Marcus
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornOctober 11, 1967
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor