Quotes from Scott Spencer

As a writer, I try to turn my feelings and experiences into a different form entirely, something that gives me mastery over them and also makes them meaningful to other people.

Contempt is a dangerous emotion, luring us into believing that we understand more than we do. Contempt causes us to jeer rather than speak, to poke at rather than touch.

That's sort of the amazing thing about writing something down and then having it printed and published - it's frozen. It's there. It's set. It's in ink. It's done. Nothing changes it.

If a book isn't teaching me something, pulling something out of me, then it will be dull for me and the reader.

With writing, you really have to have faith. You have to have some sort of confidence that if you keep at it, you will get where you need to go, because there are so many points where a rational person would quit.

Charity is for the ruling class

When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart's most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment's time ruined everything I loved –– I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shrank back in terror and my own body was locked away, it was hard for others to believe that a life so new could suffer so irrevocably. --Endless Love

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

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.

It was a once in a lifetime thing. I hate to think it but I bet it's true. It's too bad for us that our once in a lifetime happened when were too young to handle it.

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

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

Love gives us a heightened consciousness through which to apprehend the world, but anger gives us a precise, detached perception of its own.

You're all I care about," I said. "No. And me. The person I am when I'm with you, the way I see myself and know myself. That person who lives only when I'm with you.

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.

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

I made it clear to the world that what Jade and I had found in each other was more real than any other world, more real than time, more real than death, more real, even, than she and I.

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.

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.)

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...

I wanted to tell you that the man who is your father, the man who gave you life, has found a woman who is in heaven when she's in his arms.

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.