Mark Slouka Quotes & Sayings

We're angry about this, upset about that, but who has the time to do anything anymore? There are those reports to report on, memos to remember, e-mails to deflect or delete. They bury us like snow. — Mark Slouka

If I needed your condescension, I'd ask for it. — Mark Slouka

I suspect that on some level, life is a matter of indefensible loyalties. — Mark Slouka

Like a small stone deflected off a larger one, my brother had spun off toward the Almighty, though to my mind the events of that morning could just as well have cast him the other way. — Mark Slouka

Acceptance was not in my nature. Even as a young man it seemed to me that everywhere the world conspired against the heart, and though I knew the heart would lose, I couldn't bear to call it right. — Mark Slouka

I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys. — Mark Slouka

And yet, far off, I can hear something whispering that this compulsion to do, to intrude ourselves, to improve on what is
even when wholly well intentioned, particularly when wholly well intentioned
is the source of all our troubles. — Mark Slouka

Pleasure and pain are immediate; knowledge, retrospective. A steel ball, suspended on a string, smacks into its brothers and nothing happens: no shock of recognition, no sudden epiphany. We go about our business, buttering the toast, choosing gray socks over brown. But here's the thing: just because we haven't understood something doesn't mean we haven't been shaped by it. — Mark Slouka

Now and then I'd catch my mother looking at my like she was thinking about her life, like she was about to say something, but she never did. I didn't expect it. Sometimes it's better not to go back
just settle accounts as they are, call it even. — Mark Slouka

There are times in every life when the past acquires a particular resonance, when we grow sensitive to sounds and voices normally beyond the range of hearing. The past shades into present always and everywhere, but only rarely do we acknowledge the process; only rarely does some trigger force us to recognize ourselves as citizens of that frontier. — Mark Slouka

The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult
to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization
not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible in which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do, but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their "product" not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their "success" something very much like Frost's momentary stay against confusion. — Mark Slouka

a moment in the past, like a bone in the throat, that needed his attention. — Mark Slouka

Literature is literature. Its purpose is to challenge and disorient us, to break us down a little bit so that we are forced to rebuild ourselves. Over time, over the course of many books, we construct a deeper, truer self. — Mark Slouka

My mother knew a man during the war. Theirs was a love story, and like any good love story, it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake. — Mark Slouka

Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning. — Mark Slouka

Consider it: Who but God could have dreamed a tale so absurd and so heartless? — Mark Slouka

Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of our days. This is no small gift. With it we can neutralize all but the greatest losses, reduce even the greatest bastards to nothing more than bit actors in the drama of our lives, put on this earth for the sole purpose of forwarding our cause. Blessed are those who can believe their own stories. — Mark Slouka

It's a race between your foolishness and your allotted days. Good luck. — Mark Slouka

What's the takeaway?" a neighbor of mine is always asking his kids whenever they run into something harder than they are. Good question.

I have no idea. The only thing your life teaches you is how to live your life. And that's only if you're very lucky. And you listen very hard. Life teaches elliptically, epigrammatically, retrospectively. If life was a professor, you'd flunk him on his evaluations. Just tell me the goddam answer, you want to say.

It's a race between your foolishness and your allotted days. Good luck.

That's my takeaway. — Mark Slouka

Whether they really believe in their brave new world, however, is ultimately beside the point. They're building it. And in the friction-free future, jacked into paradise, we'll have the 'liberty' of living (or rather, or buying the illusion of living), through the benevolent offices of a middleman as nearly omnipotent as god himself. Freedom? A more perfect captivity is difficult to imagine. — Mark Slouka

Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language. — Mark Slouka

The only thing your life teaches you is how to live your life. And that's only if you're very lucky. And you listen very hard. — Mark Slouka

Like isolated apartment dwellers running the TV for company, we sense a deeper isolation beneath the babble of voices, the poverty of our communications. — Mark Slouka

The 'deep' civic function of the humanities ... is something understood very well by totalitarian societies, which tend to keep close tabs on them, and to circumscribe them in direct proportion to how stringently the population is controlled. — Mark Slouka

I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do something about it if at all possible. — Mark Slouka

Every step you take, a million doors open in front of you like poppies; your next step closes them, and another million bloom. You get on a train, you pick up a lamp, you speak, you don't. What decides why one thing gets picked to be the way it will be? Accident? Fate? Some weakness in ourselves? Forget your harps, your tin-foil angels - the only heaven worth having would be the heaven of answers. — Mark Slouka

History resists an ending as surely as nature abhors a vacuum; the narrative of our days is a run-on sentence, every full stop a comma in embryo. But more: like thought, like water, history is fluid, unpredictable, dangerous. It leaps and surges and doubles back, cuts unpredictable channels, surfaces suddenly in places no one would expect. — Mark Slouka

Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them. — Mark Slouka

I distrust the perpetually busy, always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters. — Mark Slouka

Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either. — Mark Slouka

We grow crisp and crotchety, fully half our organs ignore our commands
whistling to themselves, as it were, while we struggle to bring them to attention
but to balance the ledger we are allowed to dwell on the past, revisit the sites of our old humiliations, reread (without the aid of spectacles) our own misjudgments. And we do, believing that it was there, in our past, that our last best chance for happiness lay hidden; that somewhere in that thicket, now dense with self-recrimination and foolishness, trickled a freshet of joy powerful enough to redeem us. — Mark Slouka

Maybe I lacked coping skills. Maybe I was weak. I cared for people for no better reason than they seemed to care for me, acknowledge me. It didn't seem so dangerous at the time. — Mark Slouka