Jeff Scott > Recent Status Updates

As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world observed only by a single set of eyes.

“Every bookstore, library, museum, or theater that closes; every book that is censored or removed from schools and libraries; every art, music, or literature program canceled in our schools and other institutions—these should all remind us of our responsibility.”

“Living in a totalitarian society is similar to living in a disaster zone. Individuals experience a different kind of fear: the constant anxiety that the way you look, the way you act, the way you think or feel is illegal and punishable. At any moment, you could be reprimanded, arrested, or jailed simply because of who you are. ”

“I did not like the possibility of being arrested, humiliated, and flogged. I did not like the prospect of being expelled from my job or having my books censored and banned. But there was something greater than fear—or more magnetic than fear—that was driving me: an instinct for self-preservation. I knew that giving in to them meant self-negation. It meant a public abdication of who I was.”

“We don’t need a supreme leader to deprive us of our hard-earned freedoms. When we stop reading, we pave the way toward book burning; when we stop caring, we make way for someone else to take over control; when we prefer personality to character, and reality show or virtual reality to reality itself, then we get the kind of politicians that we deserve.”

“The most seductive aspect of a totalitarian society is the security it offers. The truth is uncomfortable, and a dictator promises an abdication of responsibility from it.”

“We need the poet to constantly question things as they are, to jolt us out of our comfort zones, to make us to look at the world through the eyes of others and seek to understand experiences that are not our own. ”

“We enter dangerous territory when we blur the lines between fiction and reality, or weaponize fiction to further an agenda—be it political, religious, or personal. The totalitarian mindset breaks the borders between fiction and reality, and, in the same manner, it imposes its own fictions and mythologies on the realities of its people, speaking and acting on their behalf. ”

“Reading does not necessarily lead to direct political action, but it fosters a mindset that questions and doubts; that is not content with the establishment or the established. Fiction arouses our curiosity, and it is this curiosity, this restlessness, this desire to know that makes both writing and reading so dangerous.”

“Nonetheless it is written that any person who toils over matters of Messiahs, even failed ones, even just to tell their stories, will be treated just the same as he who studies the eternal mysteries of light.”

“People gaze into the flames and find they like this theater of destruction, and a free-floating anger mounts within them, although they don’t know whom to turn it on—but their outrage more or less automatically makes them hostile to the owners of these ruined books.”

“Every one of us thinks differently, and imagines something altogether singular when he is reading. Sometimes it unsettles me greatly to think that what I write with mine own Hand, may be understood in a completely different way from how I had intended.”

“Some people have a sense of unearthly things…They can feel the subtle shifts in the great and complicated body of the world. And some of these have so honed that inner sight that they can even tell where a holy spark has fallen, notice its glow in the very place you would least expect it. The worse the place, the more fervently the spark gleams, flickers—and the warmer and purer is its light.”

“It isn’t a sin or a trait with which human beings are born, but a false view of the world, a mistaken evaluation of what is seen by our eyes. Which is why people perceive every thing in isolation, each object separate from the rest. Real wisdom lies in linking everything together—that’s when the true shape of all of it emerges.”

“On the street, women in tattered rags gather dung and wood shavings for fuel. It would be hard to say, based on their rags, whether this is a Jewish poverty, or Eastern Orthodox, or Catholic. Poverty is nondenominational and has no national identity.”

Nothing says “American” like a boy making a woman struggle so that he can seem independent.

Things are changing now, too. Our adults haven't been wiped out by a plague so they're still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things have changed a lot, and they'll change more. …This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world. Now they're waiting for the old days to come back."

There was always something they wouldn't tell everybody, and she wanted to be told, which meant she had to look like a real person to them, like a person whose mother deserved to live, like someone who loved somebody.

“The light is just bright enough to make the darkness solid. …and that is when this thought hits me. This is what it’s like to die. Maybe this is what happens to old people. The light grows dimmer and dimmer, then when it’s gone, it takes the room, the memory of the room, and everything it ever lit up with it into the dark. When I leave, I’ll be taking everything I loved with me. Right to wherever it is I’m going.”

“Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

“When in fact the conflict between what we wanted to do and what we were forced to do intensified our inner life instead of destroying it. ”

“No one gives you anything in life, Teresa would say, you have to take it by force, and as soon as you get careless they’ll take it back.”

For there is nothing unusual or remarkable about the Swart family, oh no, they resemble the family from the next farm and the one beyond that, just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans...we sound the same and we tell the same stories, in an accent squashed underfoot, all the consonants decapitated and the vowels stove in. Something rusted and rain-stained and dented in the soul, and it comes through in the voice

Survival isn't instructive, just demeaning.

He has seen all of it before many times, including the curious pull that a corpse exerts, drawing people towards it. By tomorrow already this will have changed, the body will be long gone and its permanent absence covered over with plans, arrangements, reminiscences and time. Yes, already. The disappearance begins immediately and in a certain sense never ends