Leaving the Sea: Stories
Ben Marcus
Top 10 Best Quotes
“My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Perhaps they didn't know they were at sea. Was there a certain percentage of people at sea who lacked the knowledge that they were at sea?”
“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.”
“Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren't.”
“When men cough or talk into their own hands, they are praying to their own bones, hoping to change their minds about something.”
“This first. To understand this. Then maybe." Julian was impressed. The doctor had devised a pretty good tombstone.This first. To understand this. Then maybe.”
“The colleague, no doubt, was not a connoisseur of the self-punishment, sad to think. This type of hygiene was foreign to her, no doubt. How did one even fraternize with people who could not entertain vivid scenarios of self-mutilation? How was the sexual act even possible if one's partner could not entertain being crushed under a truck, even as a cathartic exercise?”
“Loud people have thin, hollow bones. They can be broken in half and discarded into a pit. They snap as easily as children do, but they will not burn as long in a fire. If a loud person tries to store his voice in a jar, he will not be able to, unless the jar is a mouth worn on the face of someone in his family, which he must prize open with his fingers while shouting deep into the hole there.”
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Book Keywords:
vitality, relationships, knowledge, doctors, sea, health, ocean, conversation, interpersonal-relationships, genius, loneliness, physicians, life, intentions, illness, death, small-talk, intelligence, self-awareness, awareness
