Zachary Scott > Recent Status Updates

“I shall become a don; and go with schoolmasters to Greece; and lecture on the ruins of the Parthenon. It would be better to breed horses and live in one of those red villas than to run in and out of the skulls of Sophocles and Euripides like a maggot…”

Neville is only 18 and already dunking on academia - love it

“I just want this waiting to mean something”

I just gotta accept that this magazine is gonna be hit or miss lol

“Leaves are high as the domes of vast cathedrals”

Three thoughts so far:
1. Oh my god you need to LOCK IN for this book. This is not meant to be sped read which is maybe a good thing for me.
2. If I took a shot every time the narrator shifted in this first chapter, I’d be easily dead.
3. Wow these kids think about death a LOT

“I stood with fireflies any night I was able.
I fed the world's mosquitoes who fed the world's bats.” - Jane Hirshfield

Fingers crossed that I like more than 50% of the poems in this magazine issue 🤞

“I hate seeing myself dissolve and slip and separate so that I'm living in one half, my mind, and I see the other half of me helpless and frantic and driven and I can’t stop it…”

Oh no this is going to end horribly

“We were hopeful children / we charged out / like lightning
We were hopeless children / we fell to earth / like dust”

My quest to read more poetry will ultimately decimate my average page count this year lol

“Perhaps someone had once hoped to lighten the air of the blue room in Hill House with a dainty wallpaper, not seeing how such a hope would evaporate in Hill House, leaving only the faintest hint of its existence, like an almost inaudible echo of sobbing far away…”

Shirley 🔥🔥🔥

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even parks and katydids are supposed by some, to dream.”

BANGER of a first sentence

“Marketing plan for the memoir: We’re planning to generate a hubbub that creates a bit of a hoo-haa, then it won’t be long before we have a rumpus that we can whip up into a brouhaha. By publication day we should be looking at a full-on hullabaloo”

Two thoughts so far:

1. Julia Pastrana’s husband really really rubs me the wrong way (highly recommend falling down that Wikipedia rabbit hole)
2. Why am I surprised that the chapter on conjoined twins dying together ended up being super gruesome?

“We know nothing of one another, nothing Smiley mused. However closely we live together, at whatever time of day or night we sound the deepest thoughts in one another, we know nothing. How am I judging Elsa Fennan? I think I understand her suffering and her frightened lies, but what do I know of her? Nothing.”

Okay spy novels kind of rock

Was not expecting to learn this much about extinct animals lol

A department store where all of the customers are animals?? I’m so hyped

“The grief-struck teach me.
The Love-drunk teach me.
Enthralled by their bravery, their joy, their triumph, I cast off my chains.
May this freedom last forever.”

Kind of sad to be finishing this collection tonight

“What do you feed the mind to make a mind kind, noble, eager to serve?”

If anyone’s writing a psych textbook and needs epigraphs, I can hook you up 🤝

For a book about a town complicity murdering something, this is incredibly boring 🥱

“I think it's also important to remember that while statistics can be helpful, people are moved to action by stories more than statistics. So many people thank me for not putting statistics in my lectures!”

Hell yeah Jane 🔥🔥

“We are free of gripes, free of nagging thoughts and delusions,
raucous laughter is here,
parrots drunk on celestial honey.

A stroke of magic that we are here,
while breathing the air of Baghdad's orchards,
while breathing the air of Khorasan's streams, you and me.”

Forcing myself to be slow with this book since we’ll probably have to wait 3 more years for the next set of translations lol

“all the many people he ran into after leaving his house at five minutes past six and until he was carved up like a pig an hour later remembered him as being a little sleepy but in a good mood, and he remarked to all of them in a casual way that it was a very beautiful day.”

Okay the man knows how to start a book

“When melodies flood our ears,
scorpions in the mind drown.
Sorrow loses its sting.

Honeyed notes on a singer's lips
sweeten mine.

Round after round of joy
and no one has drunk
even a drop of wine.”

We are SOOO back 🔥

“When he read, heard, and watched the news, he wondered how many people were out there doing the same thing he was—scratching their heads as they tried to figure out how to prioritize their worries and confront their prejudices; drawing their own maps with their fingers crossed.”

Do Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, and Jenna Hager (or their marketing teams) fight over celebrity book club picks???

Wait a minute, THAT’S how Mussolini died?!?!

Unironically one of the 2025 releases I was most excited for

Still not sure how old the protagonist is at this point💀

“Eight-foot wingspan and gigantic in their confident gliding, black, with a red neck like a wound or a hidden treasure. Or both.

When I looked it up, I learned it was the Magnificent Frigatebird.
It sounded like that enormity of a bird had named itself.

What a pleasure to say, I am Magnificent. And, too, they traveled as a team, so I wondered if they named each other.”

MAGNIFICENT FRIGATEBIRD MENTIONED!!!🔥

"And sometimes when I get so confused about what to do, I think you could make sense of the world to me."

I need a dramatis personae in this book as desperately as a shipwreck victim needs a life raft. I cannot emphasize how bad I am at mentally juggling side characters

“Some days-dishes piled in the sink, books littering the coffee table— are harder than others. Today, my head is packed with cockroaches,

dizziness, and everywhere it hurts. Venom in the jaw, behind the eyes, between the blades. Still, the dog is snoring on my right, the cat, on my left.”