Jeff Scott > Recent Status Updates

#fridayreads

When the author writes about infinitely parellel universes, I think of the TV Show Sliders. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliders

It turned out Dunlap hand't found work as a ortician in Oakland. He and other middle-class migrants from the South, it turns out, were not unlike the immigrant taxi drivers you hear abou who had been doctors or engineers back in Pakistan. Dunlap had been somebody back home, but it didn't translate at his destination. And so he had taken a job as a laborer in the shipyard.

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What few people seemed to realize or perhaps dared admit was that the thick walls of the caste system kept everyone in prison.

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After the war, they wrote and promised and prayed. After the war we'll do this or that or another thing. After the war we'll. Be together. After the war we'll be happy. After the war we will be safe. In all their dreaming of after the war, they never dreamed there is no after to war.

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Unfulfilled! But still convinced they were the center of the universe. What did it matter whether Charly was alive or not, whether I was alive or not? Everything would roll on, downhill, toward each individual death. Everyone was the center of the universe! Nothing was beyond their sway! Even in their sleep they controlled everything! With their indifference!

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I always imagined time travel would be so big and life changing, she says, like a Wrinkle in Time or Back to the Future, but here, all those people care about are lame vacation photos and trivial things.

Justice was just a tool of power, meted out in back rooms and measured in bruises and broken bones.

I'm moved by young people who sleep with books under their heads. A book is the best pillow there is.

I try to find the books that I lost or forgot more than 30 years ago on another continent, with the hope and dedication and bitterness of those who search for their first lost books, books that if found I wouldn't read anyway, because I've already read them over and over, but that I would look at and touch just as the miser strokes the coins under which he's buried...Books are like ghosts.

#fridayreads ...the best tears are those that make us better and at the same time come closest to laughter.

Just as love moves according to a mechanism like the sea's, as the Nicaraguan poet Martinez Rivas puts it, so too do writers move, and one day they appear and then they disappear and then maybe they appear again. And if they don't, it doesn't matter so much, because in some secret way, they're us now.

My friend laughed and said that times change. And the kids are the first to know it.

The saintly readers of winter are women of flesh and blood, and they couldn't be braver. Some, it's true, committed suicide. Others endured the horrors and returned to their book, the mysterious books that women read when it's cold and it seems as if winter will never end.

Sometimes the fact that everyone in the world writes can be wonderful, because you find fellow writers everywhere, and sometimes it can be a drag because illiterate jerks strut around sporting all the defects and nine of the virtues of a real writer...it might be a good idea to do a little more reading.

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

...the ability to peer into the darkness, to leap into the void, to know that literature is a dangerous undertaking. The ability to sprint along the edge of the precipice: to one side the bottomless abyss and to the other the faces you love...and books and friends and food. And the ability to accept what you find, even though it may be heavier than the stones over the graves of dead writers. Literature...is danger."

Literature is an armor-plated machine. It doesn't care about writers. Sometimes it doesn't even notice they exist.

"I am here," she said. "You are with me. Here, now. This pain, this disease--they were with you yesterday. But you are with me today. And here, there is no room for your pain. We invite it to go home."

#fridayreads Cooking with happiness for your loved ones was like laying hands on the sick.

#fridayreads One of five thousand Mr Smiths whose names are to be met with everywhere. And what is her attraction? That she is old and sickly. Upon my word, Miss Anne Elliot, you have the most extraordinary taste! Everything that revolts other people, low company, paltry rooms, foul air, disgusting associations are inviting to you.