Jeff Scott > Recent Status Updates

How well do you know yourself, and all the choices you could make? As if to tell her, I was cut loose from a hellish marriage, and I want to meet muckrakers, carousers, the sweet‐toothed, and the lion‐hearted, and you don’t know it yet, but you are all of these.

And so, dressed in body and soul, with our multiple costumes stuck to us like feathers on a bird, we live happily or unhappily this brief time given us by the gods that we might amuse them, like children who play at serious games.

When the wind changes, some people build walls, others windmills.

“What does it feel like to be a woman in a band? I realized that those questions—that talking about the experience—had become part of the experience itself...To this day...I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman in a band—I have nothing else to compare it to. But I will say that I doubt in the history of rock journalism and writing any man has been asked, “Why are you in an all-male band?”

But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.

#fridayreads

#fridayreads

In 1882 BPL Board... recommended removal (of certain books) to what became known as the Inferno, a designated place librarians used to sequester certain books. To check out a book in the Inferno—identified with three stars in the card catalog—a patron had to fill out slip giving age and occupation, a character reference, and reason for requesting the book...This slip must receive the endorsement of the librarian...

What else is a library but a history of human error, one thought about the world installed after the one before, a series of approximations, reconsidered, repurposed?

They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure...You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.

In the end rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate.

I've always had the impression or sense of the fragility of living beings, as if each moment required an arduous energy to remain upright.

Your good deeds are like faithful partners who will accompany you from this life to the next, never leaving your side until you reach nirvana. Like good friends, they cheer you when you are discouraged and lighten your burden when the going gets tough.

The rich are obscure to us, finding ways to be unhappy when all the normal causes of unhappiness are removed. But unhappiness had touched the Lady Philosopher. Her parents were killed in their private helicopter. An elite death but at the moment of dying we are all penniless.

I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.

#fridayreads

The maelstrom of fear could drive almost anyone to become less than they were.To tear apart your neighbors, to string them up on fences. But now finally she thought she understood those few people who stood against narcos and cholobis, who stood up against money, and water knives, and militias--all the people who chose the right way instead of the easy way. Instead of the safe way. Instead of the smart way.

#fridayreads

#fridayreads

I felt indestructible. Rage made me indestructible. But not only rage. There was also a blind confidence or a kind of stubbornness that had always been with me. Because I spoke softly, but I was strong. Because I speak softly, but I'm strong. Because I never shout, but I'm strong.

I can't make spaces from nothing. I can't invent. I only manage to emulate my ghosts, write the way they used to speak, not make noise, narrate our phantasmagoria.

#fridayreads

Few realizations are as demoralizing as knowing that the only thing standing between you and what you want is yourself.

One should watch a film adaptation of a favorite book only after considering, very carefully, the fact that the casting of the film may very well become the permanent casting of the book in one's mind. This is a very real hazard.

In some instances, it seemed that the public may have confused the book drive and the waste paper campaign. Newspapers had a field day reporting some of the titles donated. How to Knit, An Undertaker's Review, and Theology in 1870 were among the million and a half books that would not be sent to servicemen.

"Librarians know from their own experiences that some printed pages are medical plasters to extract pain, others are tourists' tickets out of boredom or loneliness to exhilarating adventures, still others are diplomas for getting promotion and drilling ideas into a quick-step." ...they were now being asked "to gather more books than are contained in any existing library in the world."

"Forgiveness is an attribute of the brave."

#fridayreads "The lucky ones are people like your husband there. The ones who find work that means something to them. That they can really put their heart into, however foolish it might look to other people."

Time slipped slowly by. The tick-tock of the clock kept nudging the silence, trying to shoo it away, but the silence resisted with its dense heavy mass in which all sounds drowned. Both fought unremittingly on, the ticking clock with its obstinency of despair and the certain knowledge of death, while the silence had on its side disdainful eternity.

#fridayreads