Jeff Scott > Recent Status Updates

Gratitude is black—Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death. Thank God. It can’t get much darker than that.

“Lastly, if you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.”

“Lastly, if you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.”

Life is less terrible when you can just rest for a moment, put everything down and wait without having to worry about being washed away. People take each other’s hands and they hold on as tight as they can, they hold on to each other and to themselves, and when they let go, they can because they know that the other person will not.”

The past is greedy, always swallowing you up, always taking. If you don’t hold it back, if you don’t dam it up, it will spread and take and drown. The past is not a receding horizon. Rather, it advances one moment at a time, marching steadily forward until it has claimed everything and we become again who we were; we become ghosts when the past catches us. I can’t live as long as my past does. It’s one or the other.

There comes a time when you have to stop being who you were, when you have to let the past stay where it is, frozen and impossible. You have to let it go if you’re going to keep moving, if you’re going to survive, because the past doesn’t need a future. It has no use for what comes next.

“Zoe seems nice, but in the way that white people are nice right before they perform some new role in the secret machinery that ruins black people’s lives”

“What Roman is referring to is instead a deficiency of whiteness, a lack of some requisite sameness. This deficiency cannot be overcome. The fact is, no matter how hard he tries or how much he learns or how many skills he masters, he will always be provisional in the eyes of these people, no matter how they might be fond of him or gentle with him.”

“...when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth. As if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgment. It’s unfair because white people have a vested interest in underestimating racism, its amount, its intensity, its shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse.”

“That if the world has made up its mind about what you have to offer, if the world has decided it wants you, needs you, then it doesn’t matter how many times you mess up. What Wallace wants to know is where the limit is. When is it no longer forgivable to be so terrible? When does the time come when you’ve got to deliver on your gifts?”

“‘Just remember you’re not alone here.’
I never know what to say to that. I am actually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are.“

“they were thrown together like surly, unhappy cousins, and they needled each other in the amiable manner of enemies too lazy to make a true go at violence and harm.”

“every soul in Heaven was forgiven. The judgment had always been for show; the only one who damned you to Hell was yourself.”

“As, everyone knows, water hates poor people. Given the opportunity, water will always find a way to make poor people miserable, typically at the worst time possible.”

“The Emperor’s job was to present these plastic trays of steaming delicacies to a fake family of blond people somewhere in the middle of America, and then bow to them, while off-screen, in the shadows, a gong sounded (and further off-screen, in the mists of history, you could hear the collective weeping of a civilization going back five thousand years”

“I am a woman who one morning wrote an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me” that is about the way that the mild disparagement of having your subject of expertise explained to you by a fool who does not know that he does not know what he’s talking about or who he’s talking to is on a spectrum, and that the other end of the spectrum is full of violent death.”

You’re a phantom in both worlds and a god of sorts in the world that is not exactly the one the author wrote but some hybrid between her imagination and yours. The words are instructions, the book a kit, the full existence of the book something immaterial, internal, an event rather than an object, and then an influence and a memory. It’s the reader who brings the book to life”

You translate words into your own images, faces, places, light and shade and sound and emotion. A world arises in your head that you have built at the author’s behest, and when you’re present in that world you’re absent from your own.

There is something astonishing about reading, about that suspension of your own time and place to travel into others’. It’s a way of disappearing from where you are—not quite entering the author’s mind but engaging with it so that something arises between your mind and hers.

These kind of people always lie, and attack others, to cover their mediocrity.

...when she moves near him, the room seems to shift a little, its center of gravity adjusting in some way that he can-not see or feel—but he tastes it sometimes ...Gravity doesn't have a taste. But if it did, Manny thinks it would taste like sudden salt moving across the tongue, from slightly flavorless and sweet into a bitter, metallic weight that makes his eyes sting and his nose burn and his ears itch a little.

Manny's been in New York for less than an hour and yet he knows, he knows, that cities are organic, dynamic systems. They are built to incorporate newness. But some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen—while some new things can tear it apart.

“The guy in the green coat keeps glancing at me. “From the library,” I tell him, and he nods slowly, respectfully, it seems. “Yes, yes, that’s it,” he says. He has a slight accent and I wonder if he comes from some distant country where librarians are held in high esteem.”

These people long for immortality but can’t wait ten minutes for a cup of coffee...

“But how to categorize this elderly gentleman who keeps asking me to give him the password for his own email? I try to explain that it is not possible for me to know this, that only he knows this, but he just shakes his head in that indignant way that means, What kind of help desk is this?”

“I must look foolish, I thought, but there was so much pleasure in being a fool, why had I spent so much of my life guarding against it? I looked at Z. and N. and saw my feeling mirrored back at me, their faces shone in the dark, or that’s how I remember it, as though they were caught in the flare of a camera’s flash. But no one was taking pictures, it’s only my imagination that casts such light on them.”