85 Quotes by Ben Marcus

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

Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one’s hands free of another man’s throat, free of one’s own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too long in the elements. Gummed now, rusted, bloodless.I forget who said it and I no longer care.

Like most doctors, the fanciest ones, he seemed offensively healthy, as if he kept the real secret of vitality to himself. He would live forever and people would crumble and die around him. You were supposed to feel like death after seeing him, in terms of your complexion, your posture, your whole body. If necessary, this doctor would eat you to survive.

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

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

Knowledge is many things, but it definitely is not power. “Dread” is a better word for it, I think, though I do understand how that ultimately fails as a slogan.

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

Until the notion of Helmet-Assisted Life catches on with more people, you may be seen as a threat if you wear a helmet during moments of intimacy. Yet it might also be true that relaxed intimacy cannot occur unless the head is fully protected.

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.