Top 40 Ben Marcus Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.”

— Ben Marcus

2. “Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.”

— Ben Marcus

3. “My first book, ‘The Age of Wire and String,’ came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.”

— Ben Marcus

4. “Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.”

— Ben Marcus

5. “Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.”

— Ben Marcus

6. “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.”

— Ben Marcus

7. “A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.”

— Ben Marcus

8. “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.”

— Ben Marcus

9. “A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.”

— Ben Marcus

10. “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.”

— Ben Marcus

11. “Being 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 Marcus

12. “I’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 Marcus

13. “My goal, with whatever I’m working on, is to lose track of time.”

— Ben Marcus

14. “Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.”

— Ben Marcus

15. “I would like to outsmart the role that is destined for me. But I can’t. I have failed to destroy my category.”

— Ben Marcus

16. “A short story works to remind us that if we are not sometimes baffled and amazed and undone by the world around us, rendered speechless and stunned, perhaps we are not paying close enough attention.”

— Ben Marcus

17. “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.”

— Ben Marcus

18. “Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there’s nothing to be done about them.”

— Ben Marcus

19. “I prefer men who don’t fall down and weep, who absorb a blow, who do not scamper and yell when chased, but stand firm, crouch, square off, meet an attack with something like resistance, even if it kills them.”

— Ben Marcus

20. “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.”

— Ben Marcus

21. “Spelling a person’s name is the first step toward killing him. It takes him apart and empties him of meaning. This is why God is afraid to have his name spelled.”

— Ben Marcus

22. “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.”

— Ben Marcus

23. “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.”

— Ben Marcus

24. “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. You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.”

— Ben Marcus

25. “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.”

— Ben Marcus

26. “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.”

— Ben Marcus

27. “Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.”

— Ben Marcus

28. “It was so easy to agree to what did not test us.”

— Ben Marcus

29. “It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There’s so much power and often very little accountability.”

— Ben Marcus

30. “Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while.”

— Ben Marcus

31. “When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I’ve come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.”

— Ben Marcus

32. “The task of being right is a task the father perfects over time.”

— Ben Marcus

33. “Families necessitate energetic concealment of the obvious, to be plain about it. To be in a family is to work strenuously to suppress the truth, for reasons I cannot determine, and the shadow, when it came, caused competing strategies in the family I occupied.”

— Ben Marcus

34. “My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.”

— Ben Marcus

35. “Anyone who believes that you can make art from language is part of a small, nearly-vanishing community, and we should all form a wedge and march on the enemy. Do we need different uniforms in this struggle, different stripes on our arms so that it’s clear who the realists are? Maybe, but I care less and less.”

— Ben Marcus

36. “To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.”

— Ben Marcus

37. “When a man modifies or adorns a woman’s name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite less than herself.”

— Ben Marcus

38. “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.”

— Ben Marcus

39. “I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.”

— Ben Marcus

40. “In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it’s vivid, I find that I care about it, and it’s part of me.”

— Ben Marcus

41. “I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.”

— Ben Marcus

42. “The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue.”

— Ben Marcus

43. “One day, supposedly, a Kind Friend could give them what they needed, and clean up after, and possibly even flush the shame from their systems as well. But for the time being they still had to endure the company of other fleshy need machines, human spouters and little bags of weepery.”

— Ben Marcus