I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.
BEN MARCUSI’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.
More Ben Marcus Quotes
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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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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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Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.
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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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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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Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.
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My goal, with whatever I’m working on, is to lose track of time.
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Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.
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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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A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.
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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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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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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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My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.
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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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