85 Quotes by Ben Marcus

Thomas's mistake, like most of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that.

Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren't.

My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else.

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

Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out …

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.

Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.

It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that should flow with thunderous force between the bodies of people so bonded. We should have been able to bypass a mere inability to exchange language.

What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?