Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.
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.
More Ben Marcus Quotes
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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.
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Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.
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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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My first book, ‘The Age of Wire and String,’ came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.
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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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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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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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It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There’s so much power and often very little accountability.
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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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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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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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I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.
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Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.
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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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A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.
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