• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

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.

Ben Marcus

Related Topics

HomeLabsMotivation

Popular Authors

Marilyn Monroe Paulo Coelho Abraham Lincoln C. S. Lewis Khalil Gibran Charlie Chaplin Gautama Buddha Isaac Newton

| Next

More Ben Marcus Quotes

• 

  Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.

  BEN MARCUS
  DisorderInformationWorld
• 

  It’s lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I’ve made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There’s joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it’s not yours.

  BEN MARCUS
  JoyLonelyPassion
• 

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

  BEN MARCUS
  AgeBookReviewWire
• 

  In certain strains of Judaism, there’s a profound passion for the ineffable. Contemplation of God is meant to be forever elusive, because, you know, our tiny minds can’t possibly comprehend Him. If we find ourselves comprehending Him, then we can be sure we’re off track.

  BEN MARCUS
  PassionProfoundTrack
• 

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

  BEN MARCUS
  DesperateFailingLanguage
• 

  You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.

  BEN MARCUS
  ConsequencesDetectTerribleTest
• 

  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
  HouseKidsSummerWifeWriting
• 

  Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I’ve written and throwing it away.

  BEN MARCUS
  TeachingThinkingWriting
• 

  It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There’s so much power and often very little accountability.

  BEN MARCUS
  AccountabilityKidsParent
• 

  Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of what people need.

  BEN MARCUS
  PrayerRainSky
• 

  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
  ChildrenParentWay
• 

  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
  DisputeImpactLoveSorryTimesWonderyself
• 

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

  BEN MARCUS
  BigsDoseGrief
• 

  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
  AloneBeingLikeLoveUnderwater
• 

  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
  BookCopyrightPermissonWeatherWind
• 

  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
  ComplexityEmbraceJudaism