Myla Goldberg quotes:

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.

At this time on a weekday morning, the library was refuge to the retired, the unemployed, and the unemployable. ... 'I'm not always this gabby,' the librarian said. 'It's just so nice to talk to someone who isn't constructing a conspiracy theory or watching videos of home accidents on YouTube.

At this time on a weekday morning, the library was refuge to the retired, the unemployed, and the unemployable. ... 'I'm not always this gabby,' the librarian said. 'It's just so nice to talk to someone who isn't constructing a conspiracy theory or watching videos of home accidents on YouTube."

I'm a total atheist, and for me it's just about trying to find something that rises above the banal day-to-day bullshit of living.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.