Myla Goldberg Quotes

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.

— Myla Goldberg

“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.”

— Myla Goldberg

“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.”

— Myla Goldberg

“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.”

— Myla Goldberg

“The day's dashed hopes had temporarily reduced her to the childish presumption that someone she loved should, in return for that love, be able to read her mind.”

— Myla Goldberg

Creation takes place through words, a series of 'And God Saids' bringing each new stage of life into being. Language is God's divine power made manifest in the world.

— Myla Goldberg

“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.”

— Myla Goldberg

“The two bond over their mutual lack of family ties: Saul from his disownment, Miriam from the car accident that orphaned her as a college junior. Both want children. Miriam has inherited her parents' idea of procreative legitimacy, wants to compensate for her only-child-dom. She sees in Saul the househusband who will enable her parental ambitions without disabling her autonomy. In Miriam, Saul sees the means to a book-lined study and a lifestyle conducive to mystical advancement. They are both absolutely certain these things equal love.”

— 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.”

— Myla Goldberg

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.

— Myla Goldberg

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

— Myla Goldberg

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.

— Myla Goldberg

The Curious Incident brims with imagination, empathy, and vision - plus it's a lot of fun to read.

— Myla Goldberg