Mark Slouka

“The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult--to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization--not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible in which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do, but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their "product" not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their "success" something very much like Frost's momentary stay against confusion.”

“If I needed your condescension, I'd ask for it.”

“My mother knew a man during the war. Theirs was a love story, and like any good love story, it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake.”

“...like isolated apartment dwellers running the TV for company, we sense a deeper isolation beneath the babble of voices, the poverty of our communications.”

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

“Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of our days. This is no small gift. With it we can neutralize all but the greatest losses, reduce even the greatest bastards to nothing more than bit actors in the drama of our lives, put on this earth for the sole purpose of forwarding our cause. Blessed are those who can believe their own stories.”

“Consider it: Who but God could have dreamed a tale so absurd and so heartless?”

“...like a small stone deflected off a larger one, my brother had spun off toward the Almighty, though to my mind the events of that morning could just as well have cast him the other way.”

“We grow crisp and crotchety, fully half our organs ignore our commands--whistling to themselves, as it were, while we struggle to bring them to attention--but to balance the ledger we are allowed to dwell on the past, revisit the sites of our old humiliations, reread (without the aid of spectacles) our own misjudgments. And we do, believing that it was there, in our past, that our last best chance for happiness lay hidden; that somewhere in that thicket, now dense with self-recrimination and foolishness, trickled a freshet of joy powerful enough to redeem us.”

“Acceptance was not in my nature. Even as a young man it seemed to me that everywhere the world conspired against the heart, and though I knew the heart would lose, I couldn't bear to call it right.”