Bokelskere.no

That was what stayed with me. Being right wasn’t enough. The rules turned the right thing into a crime. The rules legitimized the desecration of the forest and took away two years of my uncles life. I learned that justice isn’t something you can count on. If you don’t do anything to change the world, it is going to keep running along the same old tracks. If you want a different outcome, you need justice to roll along different tracks. I took inspiration from a half victory.
I also took inspiration from half a loss. The bravest, strongest man I knew wasn’t quite strong enough. Alec was a warrior. He saved half a forest. I wanted to save the whole thing.

Is there intelligence? my son asked. Is anything aware?
I told him no. Nothing on Stasis needed to remember much or predict much further out than now. In such steadiness, there was no great call to adjust or improvise or second-guess or model much of anything.
He thought about that. Trouble is what creates intelligence?
I said yes. Crisis and change and upheaval.
His voice turned sad and wondrous. Then we’ll never find anyone smarter than us.

Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts’ daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out that it was the former that had condemned me. His response was that it hadn't washed away my sin for all that. I told him that I didn't know what a sin was. All they had told me was that I was guilty. I was guilty, I was paying for it, and nothing more could be asked of me.

En dag kan godt tenkes å komme
hvor du ser i ditt eget speil.
Og innen den dagen er omme
har du sett at noe er feil.

Så ser du på dine mennesker:
Marionetter, tenker du skremt.
Du løper tilbake til speilet,
men bildet av deg, det er glemt...

He'd had the sense, moments earlier, that Caroline was on the verge of accusing him of being "depressed", and he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never again win an argument.
It was therefore all the more important now to resist depression - to fight it with the truth.

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one love first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

Do I dare
Disturbe the universe?

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by bill posters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do- they think other people's opinions of them swing through great ares of approval or disapproval.

It’s awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don't want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can't turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.