13 Quotes by Myla Goldberg

They WERE walking alongside the road, they WERE hit by a car, and now they ARE dead. It doesn't work. Are is present tense. Dead is -- well, dead is past, isn't it? Present tense modifying past; being modifying non-being. Language, in this instance" -- and here Miriam makes a garbled noise in her throat-- "fails.

She has often felt that her outsides were too dull for her insides, that deep within her there was something better than what everyone else could see.

Rushing toward her are all the letters of the alphabet. Each one moves in its own way, X cartwheeling over and over, C hopping forward, M and N marching stiff-legged and resolute.

[O]nce you can read, you can no longer open a book and see a jumble of letters; after you get to know someone's face, you can't see her as a stranger.

School is consonantal in its unchanging schedule. God, full of possibility, is a vowel. Death: the ultimate consonant.

Miriam realizes she is a broken vessel, pieces of her scattered everywhere. She has been finding those pieces, in their many forms, and bringing them together so she can be whole again.

Ben Marcus has created an innovative and unflinching portrait of the turmoil of the human condition, providing the reader a most rare gift: something truly new. Notable American Women contains strains of Donald Antrim and Samuel Beckett but is beholden to neither; it is a brave, original book.

As much as I admire and value intellectualism and experimentation, I’ve discovered that unless a book has a throbbing heart as well as a sexy brain, I feel like the story is a specimen in a sealed glass jar and not a living, breathing creature I want to take by the hand and talk to for hours on end.

Eliza wonders if death is not a sleep you can’t wake up from but life reduced to one inescapable moment.