Jeff Scott > Recent Status Updates

“It had been months since I had seen the sea, a year, and I was hungry for it; I had stepped to the edge of the terrace to check my phone but found myself staring at the sea instead. You could lose yourself in it, that was what drew me, it was beautiful but also it was like looking at nothing, the sight of it drowned out thinking like the sound of it drowned out noise...”

“They could make a whole life, I thought, surprised to think it, these moments that filled me up with sweetness, that had changed the texture of existence for me. I had never thought anything like it before.”

“even annoyance was part of the pleasure we took in each other, we were that early in love.”

It’s the same between a reader and a book that becomes an intimate you very nearly did not encounter with an open mind or a welcoming heart because you were not in the right mood; that is, in a state of readiness.

Society’s unspoken agreement that women would live half a life in order that men might have the courage to pursue a whole one was suddenly understood in the light of anxieties that ran deep. These anxieties made it very near impossible to sustain without derangement the suspicion that one was, indeed, alone in the universe. (Human loneliness as a motive force for sexism).

“That’s the worst thing about teaching, that our actions either have no force at all or have force beyond all intention, and not only our actions but our failures to act, gestures and words held back or unspoken, all we might have done and failed to do; and, more than this, that the consequences echo across years and silence, we can never really know what we’ve done.”

“She understands why so many people hate her now. By existing, she reminds them of their smallness. By being different, she forces them to redefine “enemy.” By doing her best for herself, she challenges them to become worthy of their own potential.”

"Hers was an angry God, furious and disapproving, and she prayed mostly for revenges and disappointments. She prayed to be martyred in briefly agonizing ways.

"Hers was an angry God, furious and disapproving, and she prayed mostly for revenues and disappointments. She prayed to be martyred in briefly agonizing ways.

“Discovering love is like seeing a bouquet floating down a river. You have to catch it at the right time, or the river will sweep it away: it won’t wait for long. You have only a few intense, mad moments to give voice to your profound desires.”

“All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name....Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess... They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave”

You said cows recognize people who have hurt them in the past...but I ask myself, what good does it do them to remember so much when they can’t change a thing? You said goats are different. Although they get upset easily, they forgive just as quickly. Are we humans, just like sheep and goats, composed of two kinds: those who can never forget and those who can forgive...

“... Natchez-way was worse than death, was living death, an agony of knowing that somewhere in the vastness of America, the one who you loved most was parted from you, never again to meet in this shackled, fallen world. That was the love the Tasked made... how families formed in the shadow and quick, and then turned to dust with the white wave of a hand.”

Little did she yet understand that the end of childhood comes not when a child’s body changes with puberty, but when her mind is finally able to see her life through the eyes of an outsider.

As far as she was concerned, the apocalypse was not the worst thing that could happen. The possibility of an immediate and wholesale decimation of civilization was not half as frightening as the simple realization that our individual passing had no impact on the order of things, and life would go on just the same with or without us. Now that, she had always thought, was terrifying.

It is not being radical to point out that people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove, In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail.

Maybe, when queerness is so normal and accepted that finding it will feel less like entering paradise and more like claiming your own body: imperfect, but yours.

It doesn’t seem right that one should be returning on both ends of a journey, but that’s how it felt.

“Most of these administrators with their failing budgets would dance naked for money if it came down to it.”

“Just think, this moment, or any of the thousands that make up the present and the immediate past, any single one of them—maybe all of them—may soon turn into a tortured regret, a stray thought that will harden and become difficult to live with, a monster holding a hatchet constantly returning to hack away inside your skull”

If some woman stole my dad, my mom would NOT make a scene. She’d just put his stuff outside. That’s what she always says: If a man don’t treat his family right, you put his stuff outside and he knows he can’t come back. That’s the old way.

I would give up all of these things to see what our ancestors saw, to dream their vivid dreams, to come over a mountain with my mothers and sisters and suddenly see... an enormous blue meadow of blooming camas...a land breathing and rolling with blue, a land so beautiful that you would wonder how to find your voice...a song on your breath and press the strength of your body to the earth, into the deep wild blue.

Those who seek history with an upbeat ending, a history of redemption and reconciliation, may look around and observe that such a conclusion is not visible, not even in utopian dreams of a better society.

To prepare for their future lives, Jennifer, Aida, and Cynthia practiced English. Usually this meant mimicking the sounds David Bowie made in Labyrinth, their all-time favorite movie. Sometimes they shouted the lyrics of “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes, which were mostly the word “Hey” repeated a million times.”

When the wind blew, a great mass of burning pages danced into the air. The snow had melted all around and the mud sucked at your shoes with each step. An orange light illuminated the slide, the seesaw, the park benches, the walls of the restroom building. The moon and the stars were nowhere to be seen, as though they had been scattered by the brilliance of the flames, and only the corpses of burned books lit the sky.