Quotes by Mark Slouka

About Mark Slouka:

Mark Slouka is an American novelist and essayist. The son of Czech immigrants, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. He is a frequent contributor to Harper's Magazine.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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, when wholly well intentioned--is the source of all our troubles.

Mark Slouka

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

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

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

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 ...

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 cru...

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

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 so...

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 p...

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

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

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

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 neutr...

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 wil...

Mark Slouka

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

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

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

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameMark Slouka
  • DescriptionAuthor
  • BornJanuary 28, 1958
  • ProfessionWriter
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship