The Flame Alphabet Quotes

“Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“Oh, don’t worry, I am perfectly aware of the fantasy involved here, but what we want is almost never exempt from the impossible. That barrier has very little meaning for me these days. Given what’s happened, the impossible is just a blind spot that dissolves if we move our heads fast enough. History seems to show that the impossible is probably the most likely thing of all.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there's nothing to be done about them.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“Maybe this was the quiet before the real fucking quiet.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I'd said that, how many times I'd meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“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.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“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.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“I recalled a sermon Burke had delivered months ago, when everything from the Jew hole was still safely abstract, wisdom I could enjoy in the unactionable pit of my mind. They will sniff at your legs, went Burke’s sermon. They will wish they were you. Beware the man on his knees, the display of weakness. But the sermon had not passed through the radio coherently that day; static cloaked the transmission. Every other word was weakness, as if the broadcast were looping by mistake. We were to fear weakness not in oneself, where it should be cherished, but in others. Or not fear it, but mistrust it. We too easily believe in the trouble of others, erect a machinery of caring. Look through the story at the teller’s need, was the caution. Share not your full story, went the warning.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“We shared a daughter? I'd not thought about it that way before. If we shared a daughter, and something happened to Claire, then I would not have to hare Esther with her anymore. I would have Esther to myself.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“The other kids formed a roving pack, moving like one of those clusters of birds that seem to share a single, frantic brain.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“I needed my daughter to disappear from my sight. If I could have had a wish, I would have wished her away.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“He had seemed daunting when I first saw him off the trail, hulking over the Jewish couple as if he might carve into their backs and eat them. Now”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet