The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Mark Slouka

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.

anger, busyness, time, time-management, work

Pleasure and pain are immediate; knowledge, retrospective. A steel ball, suspended on a string, smacks into its brothers and nothing happens: no shock of recognition, no sudden epiphany. We go about our business, buttering the toast, choosing gray socks over brown. But here’s the thing: just because we haven’t understood something doesn’t mean we haven’t been shaped by it.

events, knowledge, life, pain, pleasure, understanding

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.

Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.

life, self-awareness, self-knowledge, writers, writing

There are times in every life when the past acquires a particular resonance, when we grow sensitive to sounds and voices normally beyond the range of hearing. The past shades into present always and everywhere, but only rarely do we acknowledge the process; only rarely does some trigger force us to recognize ourselves as citizens of that frontier.

life, past, present

I suspect that on some level, life is a matter of indefensible loyalties.

beliefs, life, loyalties, thoughts

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.

brewster, coping, mark-slouka, people, weakness

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

death, foolishness, grief, lessons, life

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

language, loss, words

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

life, literature

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

ignorance, knowledge, learning, self-improvement

The only thing your life teaches you is how to live your life. And that’s only if you’re very lucky. And you listen very hard.

dying, grief, lessons, life, living