Scott Bradfield

“IN MY SO-CALLED CAREER, I'VE OFTEN WRITTEN THINGS THAT I VAINLY THOUGHT WERE INCREDIBLY GOOD AND THAT I ENJOYED READING SO MUCH I FIGURED EVERYBODY ELSE WOULD ENJOY THEM TOO, AND MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, I HAVE BEEN TOTALLY WRONG … I never stopped being surprised that so many critics were uninterested in them, or dismissive, or even hostile. often they tried to point out the allegorical failures of the pieces, even when they were clearly as non-allegorical as they could get. and more than a couple of times, I received emails from somebody asking me what happened, why didn't I write the stories I used to write, and why did I get into all this 'animal rights' nonsense? I guess they thought I was picketing outside university research facilities. I consider all my stories and novels to be animal stories … I never understood why people took MFA degrees, or creative writing courses, and I avoided taking them myself for many years … honestly, I can't imagine why anybody would want to go through the pain and agony of having his work critiqued in an open forum - I tell my creative writing students this all the time, they are all far braver than I am!”

“I try to tell the teacher, you know. I don't give a fuck about geometry or English. Like I'm probably going to drive a truck or something when I get out of school. Join the army or something simple. I'm sure in the army they're all going to be wondering what an acute angle is. I'm sure I'll make lots of friends driving my truck because I can diagram some lousy goddamn sentence. And then after school I'm free, right? What's that mean? I go down to the bowling alley or the shopping mall with my friends. We scope the grils, smoke a little doobidge, maybe a tab of acid every now and then. But that's not really living, is it? I mean, if that's living, then excuse me right now. I'll go out and put a bullet in the old brainpan. But if that's not all there is, right, well, maybe there's something I could do a little less radical, like, you know. I don't mind life or anything--I'm perfectly willing to give it a try. So what the hell, I figured. I'm sick of school, drugs, this goddamn oppressive house of Ethel's and all. Maybe it's time I experimented a little more with my life, took a few more chances. So that's when I decided to become a warlock. To master the satanic arts of black magic. Devil worshiping, for you laymen. I want to master what they call the black arts.”

“...we're what you call heterogenous. That means we're everywhere, everybody at once. We're both good and bad, right and wrong. We're the great resolvers of conflict. We're like octopuses--because we'll swallow anything. Even men. Even battling and forlorn men like you and your dad. You guys try so hard to be subjects, characters, things, you forget us women are the whole story. We embrace you all. What you really want to destroy is women, that story of yourself you can't control.”

“The body, I have often thought, is like a promise. You keep things in it. Those things are covert, immediate, yours. There is something lustrous about them. They emit energy, like radium or appliances. They can be replaced, repaired or simply discarded. The promise of the body is very firm and intact. It's the only promise we can count on, and we can't really count on it very much.”

“We all like to think we'll grow up,' Beatrice said. 'History's the one dream we all try and dream together.' I don't want to grow up.' You already have.' I want to grow down. I want to bury myself in the hard earth. I want to root myself there like a dead tree. I want to entangle myself in the earth's heart so nobody can ever pull me out.”

“I descended to the ocean floor and encountered bloated, symmetrical creatures with pumping white hearts and translucent skin. Collapsed blue civilizations lived down there, fissured and antiseptic, craggy with barnacles and blistering rust. I reached into the heart of the earth, the sky, the moon. I colonized language, mathematics, schemes of chemical order and atomic weight. I studied the manufacture of automobiles, microcircuitry, Kleenex and planets. I memorized the gross national products of nations and hemispheres, the populations of cities and states and principalities, the achievements of presidents, tyrants and kings. I was trying to learn what I suspect Mom had learned already: that there were journeys we all make alone that take us far away from one another.”

“We're moving into sudden history now, baby. That life men lead and women disavow, that sure and certain sense that nothing is wrong, that life does not beat or pause, that the universe expands relentlessly. You can feel the source of all the world's light in your beating heart, in the map of your blood, in the vast range and pace of your brain. That's the light, baby. You don't need any other. Just that light beating forever inside you.”

“take words and make them useful,' she told me. 'drain them of all the crappy meanings they used to mean and make them mean something useful instead.”

“Life is a sweet mistake that happened when the world wasn't looking.”