Mark Slouka famous quotes

04-12-2025

Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.
-- Mark Slouka

#Loss #Gone #Language
Consider it: Who but God could have dreamed a tale so absurd and so heartless?
-- Mark Slouka

#Heartless #Absurd #Tales
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
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
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
Itâ€™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 didnâ€™t seem so dangerous at the time.
-- Mark Slouka

#Skills #People #Care
Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning.
-- Mark Slouka

#Drowning #Save Me
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 donâ€™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 angelsâ€”the only heaven worth having would be the heaven of answers.
-- Mark Slouka

#Angel #Fate #Doors
Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.
-- Mark Slouka

#Simple #Literature
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 badâ€”a marriage, a war, a run of good luckâ€”you donâ€™t know it. Itâ€™s like in the cartoons, only less funny. You run off the cliff and just keep goingâ€”talking, listening to music, making plans, for years sometimesâ€”except no announcer interrupts to say â€˜Excuse me, collect call for Mr. Coyoteâ€™ to make you notice and make us laugh. You just wake up and fall.
-- Mark Slouka

#Running #War #Fall

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