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 MARCUSAmong other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.
More Ben Marcus Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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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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I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.
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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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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.
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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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Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I’ve written and throwing it away.
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My goal, with whatever I’m working on, is to lose track of time.
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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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My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.
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You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.
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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