Home > Work > Brewster

Brewster QUOTES

Brewster QUOTES

1 " Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either. "

― Mark Slouka , Brewster

2 " 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. "

― Mark Slouka , Brewster

3 " 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. "

― Mark Slouka , Brewster

4 " One thing I'm sure, you can't tell about love, or the lack of it, except from the outside, from the way two people look at each other, from the things they do. It's like the way you can tell about a house, about the people in it, whether they're happy, from the way it looks from the street: A small pot of marigolds, a couple of chairs in the shade, tells you pretty much everything you need to know.
I could tell what they had. I could tell by the way he'd wrapped her up in that big coat of his that day in the rain, like he was a magician who could make them both disappear, by the way she'd walk next to him, or look at him when he talked to other people, that look saying, "This man is mine and I like how he is -- how he moves, how he laughs -- and he knows it and it's the two of us from here on, for everything." It was easy, unforced -- walking down the hall, she'd touch his elbow with a finger and he'd turn like a ship; she'd sigh and he'd look up. Sometimes at lunch, or in the library, you'd catch them looking at each other, a kind of calm in their eyes like after a smile, or before it, and know they were talking.
She loved him -- what more is there to say? There were times I'd look at them and feel something in my chest and throat, an ache that made it harder to breathe, but I was OK with it. I can say that now. I was OK with it. I didn't know it then, but I loved them both. Who's to say which one of them more?
It was the pot of flowers, the chair in the shade. . . . "

― Mark Slouka , Brewster

5 " Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning. "

― Mark Slouka , Brewster