“My mother knew a man during the war. Theirs was a love story, and like any good love story, it left blood… — Mark Slouka Love Copy Share Image
I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding… — Mark Slouka Busy Copy Share Image
“There are times in every life when the past acquires a particular resonance, when we grow sensitive to sounds and voices normally… — Mark Slouka Life Copy Share Image
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… — Mark Slouka Announcers Copy Share Image
“Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute… — Mark Slouka Life Copy Share Image
“Acceptance was not in my nature. Even as a young man it seemed to me that everywhere the world conspired against the… — Mark Slouka Nature Copy Share Image
“Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative… — Mark Slouka Divine light Copy Share Image
“Literature is literature. Its purpose is to challenge and disorient us, to break us down a little bit so that we are… — Mark Slouka Books Copy Share Image
“The only thing your life teaches you is how to live your life. And that’s only if you’re very lucky. And you… — Mark Slouka Dying Copy Share Image
“And yet, far off, I can hear something whispering that this compulsion to do, to intrude ourselves, to improve on what is--even… — Mark Slouka Action Copy Share Image
“I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were… — Mark Slouka Death Copy Share Image
The 'deep' civic function of the humanities . . . is something understood very well by totalitarian societies, which tend to keep… — Mark Slouka Civics Copy Share Image
Maybe I lacked coping skills. Maybe I was weak. I cared for people for no better reason than they seemed to care… — Mark Slouka Acknowledge Copy Share Image
Consider it: Who but God could have dreamed a tale so absurd and so heartless? — Mark Slouka Absurd Copy Share Image
“...like isolated apartment dwellers running the TV for company, we sense a deeper isolation beneath the babble of voices, the poverty of… — Mark Slouka Business Copy Share Image
It’s a race between your foolishness and your allotted days. Good luck. — Mark Slouka Foolishness Copy Share Image
History resists an ending as surely as nature abhors a vacuum; the narrative of our days is a run-on sentence, every full… — Mark Slouka Cutting Copy Share Image
“The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult--to such an extent have we been marginalized,… — Mark Slouka Essays Copy Share Image
“I suspect that on some level, life is a matter of indefensible loyalties.” — Mark Slouka Beliefs Copy Share Image
Whether they really believe in their brave new world, however, is ultimately beside the point. They're building it. And in the friction-free… — Mark Slouka Belief Copy Share Image
“We grow crisp and crotchety, fully half our organs ignore our commands--whistling to themselves, as it were, while we struggle to bring… — Mark Slouka Dwell on the past Copy Share Image
