Jeff Scott > Recent Status Updates

#fridayreads success in life is a reflection not only of enterprise and willpower but also of chance and early upbringing, and that compassion isn't a sign of weakness but a mark of civilization.

#fridayreads You shouldn't want to be like everybody else. Then you wouldn't be like you.

"Your books are very valuable, I told you that, and they are worth a few pounds, no more. The value is inside you, and I'm afraid you cannot take that down in a van to the auction rooms and call for bids upon it. Love does not go under the hammer, ever."

#fridayreads "But then he was the kind of man who is in league with many things--almost everything except people." p. 25

...the poor catch up to the rich to the extent that they achieve the same level of technological know-how, skill, and education, not by becoming the property of the wealthy.

#fridayreads

People kept their books, she thought, not because they were likely to read them again but because these objects contained the past--the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one's intellect, whether the work itself had been loved or despised or had induced a snooze on page forty.

Books are like mushrooms. They grow when you are not looking. Books increase by rules of compound interest: one interest leads to another interest, and this compounds into a third. Next you have so much interest there is no space in closet.

Within a generation or two, not even your photo was identifiable; just a person, at some forgotten event in old-fashioned clothes, the distractions and appetites of that day lost, an image framed halfway down a stairwell, or stuck in a drawer, or saved in digital code. Once you; in time, a stranger to all.

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Time was an abhorrent thing, a human thing. It didn't belong here. It was the power which made flesh rot and dreams wither.

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It is easier to hold a person accountable for a tragedy than holding fate, which defeats everyone impartially, accountable.

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There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.

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That morning he was afraid of becoming old, and it was a very specific kind of old age he feared, one which has nothing to do with the number of years since your birth. He feared the premature old age of missed opportunities.

#fridayreads

"...all this stuff you're involved in, it's all gossip. It's people talking behind each other behind their backs. That's the vast majority of social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication...And judgments like 'like' and 'dislike' and 'smiles' and 'frowns' were limited to junior high.

There's a huge difference between lowering your standards and adjusting your expectations. One day you're driving your boys to a restaurant and ordering whatever they want off the menu...and the next you're interviewing for a job with, if you hadn't of called your eldest, with bus fare home and not much else. Sooner or later we all face two choices: either we can adjust our expectations or have them adjusted for us.