James Marcus > Quotes

“We were a religious sect consisting of two people, and now half the congregation was gone. There would be no closure, no healing. I would simply adjust myself to a new and severely depleted reality. The world would come to an end, as it always does, one world at a time.”
― James Marcus

“Online magazines such as Salon, Slate, and Suck, had already made an elementary discovery: a reader staring into the equivalent of a thirty-watt bulb didn't want to confront thousands of words. The medium required a little extra white space, a sort of oasis for the optic nerve. ”
― James Marcus, Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut

“Optimists are the least prepared for the loss of hope.”
― James Marcus

“Venting his anger a few months later, Waldo wrote: “The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan.” Yet his shock at Webster’s treachery paled beside his reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act, a key provision of the Compromise of 1850. Americans in free states were already obliged by law to return runaway slaves to their owners. This squalid obligation had been forced into the constitution, a logrolling sop to the South that carefully avoided the word slave. The mealymouthed clause merely noted that any “person held to service or labour” with the gall to flee to another state must be promptly restored to “the party to whom such service or labour may be due.” Still, this provision had been slackly enforced. Many free states approached it with foot-dragging indifference. Many, too, passed what came to be known as personal liberty laws, which granted runaways the right to a trial by jury, habeas corpus, and other judicial protections. The time and money involved in such trials enraged slaveowners. Meanwhile, fugitives frequently took the opportunity to slip over the state line while the legal gears were grinding away. The new statute was an attempt to close all such loopholes. Now U.S. marshals and their deputies were obliged to assist in the return of runaways. Any officer who declined to carry out this task would be fined a thousand dollars—a high price for a fit of conscience. There would be no more trials, no more running out the clock. Also, the costs of rounding up fugitives would be paid by the national government, essentially federalizing the whole operation: the United States had transformed state-sponsored kidnappings into official policy. Last but not least—especially in the eyes of an agonized Waldo—the law made all Americans into its accomplices. It was now a serious crime to harbor runaways or obstruct their capture. In fact, a federal marshal could literally deputize any person on the spot: a kind of magic trick, turning ordinary citizens into snitches, quislings, enforcers. This was the last straw for Waldo.”
― James Marcus, Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Everything I have described so far seems to have happened to somebody else—to somebody else’s father. But the death of a parent happens to you, and, once it starts, it never stops. It dislodges everything.”
― James Marcus