Scott Spencer Quotes

Like you and me," said Jade. "How we used to be."
"What do you mean? Crazy?"
"Living on our own world. Believing what we felt was separate from everything else. We couldn't do anything except be together and nothing else was real."
"That's right."
"Well, that's crazy. And you just said it was, even you."
"No, " I said, "not when we both believe it. Crazy people are alone and no one understands what they mean. But that's not our way. We both know and it makes complete sense. It's not when you make it true by living it. And other people believe it, too, remember. Believe it about us. Everyone who knows us, sees us together. We have that effect.

I knew from the start that I loved her and knew, as well, that I would never fall back from that love, never try, never want to.

All of us have two minds, a private one, which is usually strange, I guess, and symbolic, and a public one, a social one. Most of us stream back and forth between those two minds, drifting around in our private self and then coming forward into the public self whenever we need to. But sometimes you get a little slow making the transition, you drag out the private part of your life and people know you're doing it. They almost always catch on, knowing that someone is standing before them thinking about things that can't be shared, like the one monkey that knows where a freshwater pond is. And sometimes the public mind is such a total bummer and the private self is alive with beauty and danger and secrets and things that don't make any sense but that repeat and repeat and demand to be listened to, and you find it harder and harder to come forward. The pathway between those two states of mind suddenly seems very steep, a hell of a lot of work and not really worth it. Then I think it becomes a matter of what side of the great divide you get caught on. Some people get stuck on the public, approved side and they're all right, for what it's worth. And some people get stuck on the completely strange and private side of the divide, and that's what we call crazy and its not really completely wrong to call it that but it doesn't say it as it truly is. It's more like a lack of mobility, a transportation problem, getting stuck, being the us we are in private but not stopping…

The only things I regret, and the only things I'll ever regret are things I didn't do. In the end, that's what we mourn. The paths we didn't take. The people we didn't touch.

He welcomes the chance to do fatherly things with the little girl, and those ten morning minutes with dear little four-year-old Ruby, with her deep soulful eyes, and the wondrous things she sees with them, and her deep soulful voice, and the precious though not entirely memorable things she says with it, and the smell of baby shampoo and breakfast cereal filling the car, that little shimmering capsule of time is like listening to cello music in the morning, or watching birds in a flutter of industry building a nest, it simply reminds you that even if God is dead, or never existed in the first place, there is, nevertheless, something tender at the center of creation, some meaning, some purpose and poetry.

The trouble with excuses, however, is that they become inevitably difficult to believe after they've been used a couple of times.

heavy, sullen girl with a face as blunt and expressionless as a knee,

I never felt so large and important as I did when being in love was everything. I saw you walking a foot above the earth and I remembered that was where I used to walk.

If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more that we all shared the dream of never dying or traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner more unhappy illusion we call normal life.

All I wanted was what I'd already had. That exultation, that love. It was my one real home; I was a visitor everywhere else.

I never think of the life I'll miss after I'm dead, or all that I missed before I was born. It's the time I'm as good as dead during this, my one and only life, that makes me tear at my hair. It seems to me that if I carefully gathered all of the time I was entirely alive I would have amassed perhaps two years of life so far ...

No pain could match the emptiness of separation, no agony rivaled the unreality of not being with her.

I thought of my mother ( ... ). Freud wrote that no man is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong.

Everything creepy and Southern isn't Faulknerian, just like everything annoying isn't Kafkaesque.

I had known another world. It is impossible to give it a name. There are words like enchantment, words like bliss, but they didn't say it, they were stupid words. No words really said it. There was nothing to say about it except that I had known it, it had been mine. It was the one real thing, more real than the world.

A novelist is someone who sits around the house all day in his underwear, trying not to smoke.

I try to know as much as I can about a book before the beginning, but I never know exactly where it's going to end.

I'm speaking to you man to man," he said, "not doctor to patient. How much longer can you continue denying yourself? You can't live without warmth." "Warmth?" I said, sending him a 'shut up' message. "Yes. Sexual expression. David, you don't even masturbate." We were silent for at least a minute. My intrigues huddled within me like guerilla warriors, hiding behind other thoughts. Finally, I thought of something to say: "If we're going to talk man to man and not doctor to patient, then I don't think you should charge me for this hour.

From the time I learned to love Jade and was drawn into the life of the Butterfield house, straight through to the wait for my case to come before the judge, there was nothing in my life that wasn't alive with meaning, that wasn't capable of suggesting weird and hidden significances, that didn't carry with it the undertaste of what for lack of anything better to call it I'll call The Infinite. If being in love is to be suddenly united with the most unruly, the most outrageously alive part of yourself, this state of piercing consciousness did not subside in me, as I've learned it does in others, after a time. If my mind could have made a sound, it would have burst a row of wineglasses. I saw coincidences everywhere; meanings darted and danced like overheated molecules. Everything was terrifyingly complex; everything was terrifyingly simple. Nothing went unnoticed and everything carried with it a kind of drama.

I don't want to say it, I truly don't, but if you've gone this far I suppose it's obvious that what was ignited when I loved you continues to burn. But that's of small importance to you now, and that's how it should be. Everything is in its place. The past rests, breathing faintly in the darkness. It no longer holds me as it used to; now I must reach back to touch it. It is night and I am alone and there is still time, a moment more. I am standing on a long black stage, with a circle of light on me, which is my love for you, enduring. I have escaped - or have been expelled - from eternity and am back in time. But I step out once more to sing this aria, this confession, this testament without end. My arms open wide, not to embrace you but to embrace the world, the mystery we are caught in. There is no orchestra, no audience; it is an empty theater in the middle of the night and all the clocks in the world are ticking. And now for this last time, Jade, I don't mind, or even ask if it is madness: I see your face, I see you, you; I see you in every seat.

It was the first time I had heard the truth of what happened that afternoon said in a voice that was not my own. Hearing what happened from Ann was like the difference between seeing your face in a mirror and seeing it in a photograph.

On a ship that's made of paper, I would sail the seven seas. (Just to be with you.)