Ben Marcus Quotes

Until the notion of Helmet-Assisted Life catches on with more people, you may be seen as a threat if you wear a helmet during moments of intimacy. Yet it might also be true that relaxed intimacy cannot occur unless the head is fully protected.

~ Ben Marcus

When a man modifies or adorns a woman's name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite less than herself.

~ Ben Marcus

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

~ Ben Marcus

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

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

I would like to outsmart the role that is destined for me. But I can't. I have failed to destroy my category.

~ 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

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

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 kills them.

~ Ben Marcus

Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while.

~ Ben Marcus

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

~ Ben Marcus

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

~ Ben Marcus

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

~ 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 to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction need to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.

~ 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 example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue.

~ 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 of people so bonded. We should have been able to bypass a mere inability to exchange language.

~ 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

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

The task of being right is a task the father perfects over time.

~ 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 terms of your complexion, your posture, your whole body. If necessary, this doctor would eat you to survive.

~ 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

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

~ 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. Death by conversation, and all that.

~ Ben Marcus

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