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Mark Slouka Quotes

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

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

Mark Slouka
Loss, Gone, 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.

Mark Slouka
Running, Cutting, Water

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

Mark Slouka
Heartless, Absurd, Tales
Mark Slouka (2011). “God's Fool”, p.158, Vintage

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
Humanity, Population, Proportion

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

Mark Slouka
Good Luck, Race, Luck

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
Skills, People, Care
Mark Slouka (2014). “Brewster: A Novel”, p.61, W. W. Norton & Company

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

Mark Slouka
Drowning, Save Me
Mark Slouka (2013). “Brewster”, p.41, Portobello Books

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
Angel, Fate, Doors
Mark Slouka (2014). “Brewster: A Novel”, p.255, W. W. Norton & Company

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

Mark Slouka
Simple, Literature
Mark Slouka (2014). “Brewster: A Novel”, p.159, W. W. Norton & Company

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
Pain, Circles, Soul
"Quitting the Paint Factory". Harper’s Magazine, November 2004.

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
Believe, Brave New World, Perfect

Most of the time when something goes bad—a marriage, a war, a run of good luck—you don’t know it. It’s like in the cartoons, only less funny. You run off the cliff and just keep going—talking, listening to music, making plans, for years sometimes—except no announcer interrupts to say ‘Excuse me, collect call for Mr. Coyote’ to make you notice and make us laugh. You just wake up and fall.

Mark Slouka
Running, War, Fall

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