Scott Spencer Quotes

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

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

— Scott Spencer

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

— Scott Spencer

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

“It was only vanity and discouragement that sometimes made me feel alone with my endless love, but now that I was taking one of the risks my heart had urged upon me I could also feel I was not alone. If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more than we all shared the dream of never dying or of 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. After all, the intimations of endless love were the same now as they were thousands of years before, while normal life had changed a thousand times and in a thousand different ways. Which then, was more real?”

— Scott Spencer

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

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.

— Scott Spencer

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

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

— Scott Spencer

“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 ...”

— Scott Spencer

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

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

— Scott Spencer

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

— Scott Spencer

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

Daniel's mind is a scorpion stinging itself to death.

— Scott Spencer

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

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.

— Scott Spencer

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

“My first love was everything, all at once. The kind of love you fight for, the kind of boy you fight for.”

— Scott Spencer

“If my mind could have made a sound, it would have burst a row of wineglasses.”

— Scott Spencer

“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.”

— Scott Spencer

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

— Scott Spencer