Mark Slouka Quotes

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.

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

...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.

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.

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.

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

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