Mark Slouka Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

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

Mark Slouka

#6. Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.

Mark Slouka

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.

Mark Slouka

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

Mark Slouka

#12. a moment in the past, like a bone in the throat, that needed his attention.

Mark Slouka

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. I suspect that on some level, life is a matter of indefensible loyalties.

Mark Slouka

#17. 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

#18. If I needed your condescension, I'd ask for it.

Mark Slouka

#19. 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

#20. Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning.

Mark Slouka

#21. Consider it: Who but God could have dreamed a tale so absurd and so heartless?

Mark Slouka

#22. 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

#23. 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