You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.
BEN MARCUSI 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.
More Ben Marcus Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.
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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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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.
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My goal, with whatever I’m working on, is to lose track of time.
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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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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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A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.
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My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.
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Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.
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