Jeff Scott > Recent Status Updates

#fridayreads Bolano's short stories

#fridayreads Great so far, reads like a Ken Burns Documentary.

Chile itself the whole country, had become the Judas Tree; a leafless, dead-looking tree, but still deeply rooted in the black earth..life was much more important than literature...

...the mystery we carry in our hearts, and which, in a moment of rapture we set in the centre of a metal tray inscribed with Mycenaean characters, characters that stammer out our history and our hopes, but what they stammer out in fact is nothing more than our defeat, the joust in which we have fallen although we do not know it, and we have set our heart in the middle of that cold tray, our heart, our heart...

One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one's actions, and that includes one's words and silences, yes one's silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one's silences.

#fridayreads

We all have an unexpected reserve of strength inside that emerges when life puts us to the test.

Almost nothing, it seems, escaped the devious wiles of food adulterers. Sugar and other expensive ingredients were often stretched with gypsum, plaster of Paris, sand, dust. And other forms of daft, as much additives were collectively known...A tea drinker might unwittingly take in anything from sawdust to powdered sheep's dung.

#fridayreads

As it turned out, by supporting a family under these circumstances, we were, in effect, rewarding precisely those people who had chosen to give their children to traffickers. We learned that this was likely to inspire neighbors to send their child off with a trafficker, hoping they might miraculously end of in the hands of a western nonprofit org. Never mind that the great majority of these children never returned...

Returning to a ward that contained not a single bar of soap, preparing to spend another night with two young boys whose language I did not speak, about to ingest some fantastically unsanitary food for dinner. This is where I belonged. That realization brought me immense comfort.

#fridayreads

#fridayreads

It's not like we were those homeless people you saw pushing shopping wagons full of sad things like picture frames, electronic parts, and bags of clothing. Such obviously broken people that you could guess, just by looking, what it was that bent and broke to get them there. Compared to them we were still lucky, without whole lives that needed pushing carts or carrying in bags that kept busting open...

#fridayreads I now own one of the most dangerous books in the world.

Had I known when I left that there would be no going back, no returning to a roof over my head, I'm not sure I would have done it. After all, isn't that what really draws the line between childhood and adulthood, knowing that you are soley responsible for yourself? If so, then my childhood ended at fifteen

We're not used to persons who do things simply for the love of God whom they don't believe in.

#fridayreads