Bokelskere.no

He had one of those faces that ages prematurely but then goes on looking the same forever. He might even look young in another twenty years.

You can only give things up once they start to let you down.

To forgive someone, one would have to be convinced that they'd made some effort to change the disastrous course that genetics, class or upbringing proposed for them.

When you're young it makes a difference to meet people who are kind, however rarely [...] Incidents of kindness get thrown into sharp relief.

It was a terrible shock to me when I realized I was getting too old to die young anymore.

He knew that however much trouble he put into repairing himself, like a once-broken vace that looks whole on its patterned surface but reveals in its pale interior the thin dark lines of its restoration, he could only produce an illusion of wholeness.

Only when he could hold in balance his hatred and his stunted love, looking at his father with neither pity nor terror but as another human being who had not handled his personality especially well; only when he could live with the ambivalence of never forgiving his father for his crimes but allowing himself to be touched by the unhappiness that had produced them as well as the unhappiness they had produced, could he be released, into a new life that would enable him to live instead of merely surviving.

Neither revenge nor forgiveness change what happened.

Switchblades of memory that had flashed open all his life reappeared and silenced him.

Most people either feel regret at staying with someone for too long, or regret at losing them too easily. I manage to feel both ways at the same time about the same object.