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Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus Biography

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“James shows his feelings so liberally that they come at a discount, and their value diminishes. When he says he loves me, usually in a threatening way, the statement always seems to beg for reciprocation. I guess he cries wolf. More or less sobs it. One could argue that everything James says is merely the word “wolf” in one language or another.”

EmotionsWomen And MenHusbands And WivesMen S Feelings
Book:Notes from the Fog: Stories
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“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.”

NamesLanguageLabelsCategoriesMediocrityOriginalityNaming
Book:Notable American Women
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“Family seems so rich and complicated to me. There's meant to be this unfailing biological loyalty and yet at the same time it's this theatre for various kinds of cruelty. I know it doesn't always work out that way, but the worst possible behaviour is sort of allowed for. It looks to me like an endlessly rich container for really terrible drama, but also pretty grand love. It accommodates such a variety of feeling in such a natural way, and it feels so relatable, and yet it's such a funny construct, socially, the family.”

KindFeelingsNaturalRichWorstTerribleDramaVariousWork OutComplicatedTheatreLoyaltyCrueltyVarietyMeant To BeRelatable
Author:Ben Marcus
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“I don't like real places, but I don't like imagined ones either. I feel like I'm looking for some mixture and it's very hard for me to say because I like to use real place names because there's an uncanny feeling to them, but at the same time I don't ever really try to make them plausible. Sometimes I like to use them as a way to hide in plain sight a little bit, because to me a very exotic or imagined setting has a lot of weight and a lot of burden to it, and it doesn't suit me, but a real place seems to have its own weird legacy, so I don't know what the choice is?”

TryingRealSometimesFeelingsChoicesBurdenLegacyPlain Sight
Author:Ben Marcus
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“People are considered as areas that resist light, mistakes in the air, collision sweet spots. At the time of this writing, the whole world is a crime scene: People eat space with their bodies; they are rain decayers; the wind is slaughtered when they move. A retaliation is probably coming. Should a person cease to move, she would cease to kill the sky, and the world might begin to recover.”

PeopleWorldShouldWritingPersonsWholeBodyLightMightMovingSpaceMistakeAirSkyCrimeSweetWindSceneRainAreasCeaseWhole WorldSpotsCollisionRetaliation
Book:Notable American Women: A Novel
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“RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. 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.”

GivingMindBelieveArtUsePainFormLanguageKnownClearWiseReaderBusyHarmIndifferenceListenersRhetoricSignalsAlarmsBelievablePunctuationUse Of Language
Book:The Age of Wire and String
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