Quotes from Mark Slouka

And yet, far off, I can hear something whispering that this compulsion to do, to intrude ourselves, to improve on what is--even when wholly well intentioned, particularly when wholly well intentioned--is the source of all our troubles.

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

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.

a moment in the past, like a bone in the throat, that needed his attention.

The prevailing mood was one of sullen desperation; poverty fluttered along behind us like a rag caught in the carriage door.

Who knows what somber ancestor had passed on to me this talent, this precocious ear for loss? For a while, because of it, I misheard almost everything.

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.

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.

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

I can navigate the canals of self-delusion, say, like nobody's business. The less certain something is, the more I understand it; the less tangible it is, the more readily my fingers grasp it. Just give me a little shove down the byways of regret, and I'm in my element. Which