I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.
BEN MARCUSI love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.
BEN MARCUSI’m interested in the hope we invest in science, and the disappointment we can feel when science flattens, or ‘explains,’ the larger mysteries of religion.
BEN MARCUSFiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.
BEN MARCUSIt amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There’s so much power and often very little accountability.
BEN MARCUSSuspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.
BEN MARCUSSlamming 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 MARCUSRHETORIC 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.
BEN MARCUSYou can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.
BEN MARCUSI like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.
BEN MARCUSAmong other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.
BEN MARCUSTo 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 MARCUSIt’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 MARCUSBeing 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 MARCUSI’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 MARCUSA self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
BEN MARCUSRain 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