“I suspect that on some level, life is a matter of indefensible loyalties.” — Mark Slouka Beliefs Copy Share Image
Consider it: Who but God could have dreamed a tale so absurd and so heartless? — Mark Slouka Absurd Copy Share Image
It’s a race between your foolishness and your allotted days. Good luck. — Mark Slouka Foolishness 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 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
“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
“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 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
“...like a small stone deflected off a larger one, my brother had spun off toward the Almighty, though to my mind the… — Mark Slouka Brother Copy Share Image
“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
“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
“Pleasure and pain are immediate; knowledge, retrospective. A steel ball, suspended on a string, smacks into its brothers and nothing happens: no… — Mark Slouka Events 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 Acceptance 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
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
“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
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 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 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 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
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
“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
Every step you take, a million doors open in front of you like poppies; your next step closes them, and another million… — Mark Slouka Accidents 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
