Spencer Scott

“Where had they learned to converse and to dance? I couldn't converse or dance. Everybody knew something I didn't know. The girls looked so good, the boys so handsome. I would be too terrified to even look at one of those girls, let alone be close to one. To look into her eyes or dance with her would be beyond me.

And yet I know that what I saw wasn't as simple and good as it appeared. There was a price to be paid for it all, a general falsity, that could be easily believed, and could be the first step down a dead-end street.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“In my experience, people who study climate change are planning for this last scenario in their own daily lives. At work, they write about the RCP2.6 path and how to get on it. At home, in their free time, they fight to get their communities on the RCP2.6 path. But when their day is over and they are sitting on the couch, they make choices that reflect their worry that we are probably on the RCP8.5 path. They look online at properties in, say, Canada or Sweden. They talk to real estate agents and ask questions like, "Does it have year-round flowing water?" They have conversations with their partners about which countries have stable governance and won't have malaria. With insider information and disposable income, they are preparing in advance to flee.”
― Rob Dunn, A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species

“One price you pay for being taken for a god is the unabated dreaminess of your acolytes.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre