Best 21 quotes of Mark Slouka on MyQuotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Who knows what somber ancestor had passed on to me this talent, this precocious ear for loss? For a while, because of it, I misheard almost everything.