I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.
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.
More Ben Marcus Quotes
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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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I’m an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard’s books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work – the pursuit of darkness, the negative – and I think in some sense I’ve internalised that as what one is supposed to do.
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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 work, and then I leave the office, and I’m with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don’t feel like I’m exorcising my own deep ideas about parenthood and about how my life will come into play in my work.
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My goal, with whatever I’m working on, is to lose track of time.
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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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Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there’s nothing to be done about them.
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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.
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The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can’t just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.
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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.
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I’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.
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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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My first book, ‘The Age of Wire and String,’ came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.
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It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There’s so much power and often very little accountability.
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A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
BEN MARCUS