Mark Slouka > Quotes

“Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.”
― Mark Slouka, God's Fool

“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

“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, Brewster

“Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.”
― Mark Slouka, Brewster

“Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning.”
― Mark Slouka, Brewster

“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

“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, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations

“Consider it: Who but God could have dreamed a tale so absurd and so heartless?”
― Mark Slouka, God's Fool

“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, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations

“If I needed your condescension, I'd ask for it.”
― Mark Slouka, The Visible World

“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, God's Fool

“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, God's Fool

“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, Brewster

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

“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

“...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, God's Fool

“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, God's Fool

“I thought of calling this piece “In Memoriam,” because “in memoriam” has always suggested a place to me—Memoriam, Oklahoma, say, or Memoriam, Tennessee—and because, to my tinker’s brain, “in memoriam,” sounds like “in memory am.” Which I am, now more than ever. Lost, basically, wandering that ancestral home, all polished wood and anecdote, wishing that I could unload it somehow, knowing I never will. Like it or not, I have an investment in Memoriam now. My father’s casket between the potted palms is the cornerstone. Welcome home, kid.

It’s an odd, slightly ghostly predicament. Lacking brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with my mother’s memory having long ago lost any trace of me, I find myself the sole surviving owner of ten thousand names, stories, jokes, associations—that time the raccoon reached up through the knothole in the cabin floor when I was four; those Friday nights when the three of us would watch “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”; that evening, a memorable night in 1966, when my dad, with his professorial air and his Czech accent and his horn-rims, put on my mother’s shoulder-length blond wig on a dare and went out to pick up the pizza—that mean nothing, except that they were the soil of our lives.”
― 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, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations

“I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do something about it if at all possible.”
― Mark Slouka, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations

“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

“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, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations

“One thing I'm sure, you can't tell about love, or the lack of it, except from the outside, from the way two people look at each other, from the things they do. It's like the way you can tell about a house, about the people in it, whether they're happy, from the way it looks from the street: A small pot of marigolds, a couple of chairs in the shade, tells you pretty much everything you need to know.
I could tell what they had. I could tell by the way he'd wrapped her up in that big coat of his that day in the rain, like he was a magician who could make them both disappear, by the way she'd walk next to him, or look at him when he talked to other people, that look saying, "This man is mine and I like how he is -- how he moves, how he laughs -- and he knows it and it's the two of us from here on, for everything." It was easy, unforced -- walking down the hall, she'd touch his elbow with a finger and he'd turn like a ship; she'd sigh and he'd look up. Sometimes at lunch, or in the library, you'd catch them looking at each other, a kind of calm in their eyes like after a smile, or before it, and know they were talking.
She loved him -- what more is there to say? There were times I'd look at them and feel something in my chest and throat, an ache that made it harder to breathe, but I was OK with it. I can say that now. I was OK with it. I didn't know it then, but I loved them both. Who's to say which one of them more?
It was the pot of flowers, the chair in the shade. . . .”
― Mark Slouka, Brewster

“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, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations

“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, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations

“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, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations

“I suspect that on some level, life is a matter of indefensible loyalties.”
― Mark Slouka, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations

“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, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations