Scott > Scott's Quotes

“Flambé - done beside a table covered in crisp starched linen in a French restaurant: a method to burn food and money simultaneously.”
― Scott Archer Jones

“It rained for four days and four nights, hard. Aniline wasn’t used to it. At first in the neighborhoods, ditches adjacent to the streets handled the flood. The water finished filling the ditches and hid the potholes in the roads. Rain then brimmed the streets over, making Aniline into Venice. It eventually spread out in the low spots in the driveways, invaded lawns, and crept up towards the house foundations. People wandered into the café with squelching boots and comments ranging from philosophical to querulous. Then the weather broke. They had two intensely hot days. Banks of mist rose off the saturated yards and fields. The roads drained, and a blanket of mud covered the pavements. As if all this wasn’t enough, a super-cell thunderstorm rolled towards them to give them another taste of violent Texas weather.”
― Scott Archer Jones

“Women and men in scrubs swept into the room and checked the monitors and the bags. They strode out, nodded at the quartet slumped in chairs against the wall, and scuffed down the hall. Nurses changed shifts, moved the life of the place along while patients and visitors waited frozen, locked into little boxes of concern and fear.
The strange hours of the pre-dawn arrived, when the hospital hushed even as the business of sickness and death ground on.”
― Scott Archer Jones

“He took himself off to bed. He wasn’t going to sit there and wait for an answer like he had sent e-mail to God. God didn’t exist, but he prayed regardless that all this would be gone in the morning. This had to be a glitch in the computer or in his mind. Maybe he had experienced a small stroke. Or maybe he was drunk, on a single glass.
He had made a mistake with the drink—with it in his blood, he couldn’t take the Prozac. That could be the best explanation…some cross between whiskey and yesterday’s Prozac.
He lay in the dark, up in the rafters of the sky, waiting for sleep. Somewhere around four, he dropped off and dreamt of panicked birds flying up out of trees.”
― Scott Archer Jones

“He had to wait in the sitting room for forty-five minutes. The room smelled of disinfectant and potpourri—he had the outlandish sensation he was in a medicinal Indian restaurant. During this time, he sat back in the corner, poised on the edge of his seat. It made the waiting easier if he leaned forward on his elbows with his hands between his legs as his knees drummed up and down. The other patients spread out through the room, each maximizing the distance to another human.”
― Scott Archer Jones

“He pulled on a coat and walked down the flight of stairs from the head house into the distribution floor. Then he walked to the far end to the east. This was the top floor of the grain elevator. He passed eighteen of the great bins–six on one side and twelve on the other, closed up with their huge twenty-foot concrete covers. At the end of the building, the ninety-year-old windows faced the coming night. Out there in the gloaming he could see orange needles standing against the dark reflecting the sunset. These spires luminescing in last light were other grain elevators, dotted across Texas down the rail line–all except one. The exception was a cross shrouded in farmer tin. Its owners billed it as the biggest cross in the world, and it anchored a truck stop and religious bookstore to the Interstate Highway.”
― Scott Archer Jones

“If time is analog, then the New Year is an ephemeral event with no time measure at all, not even a nanosecond. It's careening around the world towards you, like some subatomic particle wave. Whoops -- you missed it.”
― Scott Archer Jones

“Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.”
― Edwin Percy Whipple

“Let me twine
Mine arms about that body, where against
My grained ash an hundred times hath broke
And scarr'd the moon with splinters: here I clip
The anvil of my sword, and do contest
As hotly and as nobly with thy love
As ever in ambitious strength I did
Contend against thy valour. Know thou first,
I loved the maid I married; never man
Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold.”
― William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

“In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer...”
― George Orwell

“No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-
woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins