Jeff Scott > Recent Status Updates

“I looked at the ring, which was as heavy as I remembered…”It’s called nacre,” Grandfather had explained. “It’s a kind of calcium carbonate that a mollusk produces, building layers and layers of it around an irritant—like a speck of sand—in its mantle. You can see it’s very strong.”
“Can humans make nacre?” I had asked, and Grandfather had smiled.
“No,” he said. “Humans have to protect themselves in other ways.”

“They didn’t have money, and who knew how long they would have life? Preparing to be thirty, much less forty or fifty, was like buying furniture for a house made of sand—who knew when it would be washed away, or when it would start disintegrating, falling apart in clots? It was far better to use what money you could make proving to yourself that you were still alive. ”

“We’re all entitled to a bad day now and again, I heard Gran say in my head. But when they are all bad days, with no pleasant ones, then it’s time to reconsider things.”

“We’re all entitled to a bad day now and again, I heard Gran say in my head. But when they are all bad days, with no pleasant ones, then it’s time to reconsider things.”

“We are social creatures. Even the introverted readers, the silent writers, want a place where they feel welcomed and understood. I had wanted that once, and now I can give it to others. That’s how I’ve wound up putting my degree to work. That’s how I discovered that my truest destiny was a thing I never saw coming.”

“I’m pretty much the poster child for how to incorporate the humanities into your life. It is my greatest love, my deepest joy, and all I want to do is share it, to use books and writers to bridge the lonely technological divide we find ourselves stuck in. …They brought an audience of people who might not have been in a bookstore in a long time, and they eyed the place with wonder.”

“I am not using the dog or the book or the bookstore or the stepchildren to fill a hole left by not having children, because there is no hole. I can love those people, that dog, those books, for exactly who and what they are.”

“For the rest of the summer Tavia drove down from Louisville on the weekends to work on the cleanout with her sister. I, too, kept going back to 24-S, both to see my friend and to bear witness to the closing down of a world that had helped to shape me. “He made everything magic when he was alive,” Therese said sadly one day. “Now it’s all just stuff.” ”

Our myths have not served us well. We are the most unequal of the Western democracies. ...The 1619 Project seeks to explain this present-day reality and challenge these myths not to tear down or further divide this country ...but so that we can truly become the country we already claim to be.

“The jittery focus, the devastated shelves, a couple of fights breaking out over paper towels, a swarm descending on an employee trying to restock toilet paper, madness in people’s eyes—it was like beginning of every show where the streets empty and something terrifying emerges from mist or fire.”

“The life of the writer cannot help but haunt the narrative”

“Then I felt it. The earth held its breath. There was a slow release and then a soft downsifting silence. I turned my lamp off and my thoughts dimmed. It was starting to snow. At last, the pure and fragile snow was falling upon us, separating off the air from the dirt, the living from the dead, the reader from the book.”

“I am rehabilitated, I only sell words. Collections of words between cardboard covers.

Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters.”

"Mom talked about fighting. She said if she wasn’t fighting she was dying. And that she has to fight to feel alive and to balance things out. So she keeps fighting. She said we’re all fighters, our whole family. Even the dead ones. They fought the hardest."

"Madame said I had one too many fights, which if I knew the exact number of fights I was supposed to have then there wouldn’t be this bullshit, I said."

When I was little, July had been my favorite month. Nothing unusual about that, it was the simplest, most carefree of months, with its long days full of light and warmth. Then, when I became a teenager, it was the autumn I'd liked, the darkness and rain, perhaps because it brought a sense of gravity to life that I found romantic and could measure up to.

At best, you would have written a novel that was an emotional palliative for some couple in suburbia. For a few moments they’d think how terrible it was for these refugees. They’d get outraged on social media for ten minutes. But then they’d pour another glass of chardonnay. Empathy is overrated.

"What is life if not a habituation to loss?”

“I guess, to answer your question, Dad/God: neither. I do not want to continue to rape, pillage and plunder. But neither do I particularly want to get back into the productive mode. I want to be always moving on and coming home.”

“I said, “I am delivering a message from the future.”
“Like the Terminator,” Rust helped.
“Yes!” I said, pointing vigorously at him, though in truth I have never seen those movies. “I’m like the Terminator! The reverse Terminator! I want you to live. I want you to flourish. I want you to thrive!”

He must not confuse her with a truly good person...But how much can one person take on? We live in America...where you put your oxygen mask on first. But either way, the plane is going to crash. So why not tender a little kindness before she, too, is a body in a ditch on the side of the road, availing herself of whatever afterlife will be afforded in somebody else’s head, if that?

Who now to champion her way of being in the world?

Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.

Stories are life lived backward.

“stanley…he has come upon the grisly notion of editing my letters after my death and has made me write my mother…and tell her never to throw away anything i have written her so the poor woman will really have to get an attic built onto their one-story ranch style california house to store my letters. if i locate anyone who will cough up forty dollars a page i will let you know.”

“Yours was the only kind letter I received. I am less than pleased with the unkind letters, which all come from librarians, and ask how we are ever going to beat the Russians to the moon if our kids read all this fantasy stuff… and recommend stern measures for my children, who are clearly never going to be able to cope with the modern world, and will clearly fall into all kinds of psychological pitfalls.”

" i quite agree with you about the recent stories. they are written simply for money, and the reason they sound so bad is that those magazines won’t buy good ones, but deliberately seek out bad stuff because they say their audiences want it. i simply figure that at a thousand bucks a story, i can’t afford to try to change the state of popular fiction today”

“The choice is not between what was and what is but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing. … Stick to a strict interpretation of the natural and these—along with thousands of other species—are goners. The issue, at this point, is not whether we’re going to alter nature but to what end?”

“Gene-drive technology has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut’s ice-nine, a single shard of which is enough to freeze all the water in the world. A single X-shredder mouse on the loose could, it’s feared, have a similarly chilling effect—a sort of mice-nine.”

“A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a god-like force; it’s no longer exactly a river, though. It’s hard to say who occupies Mount Olympus these days, if anyone.”