Bokelskere.no

I was stealing saltshakers again. Ten, sometimes twelve a night, shoving them in my pockets, hiding them up my sleeves, smuggling them out of bars and diners and anywhere else I could find them. In the morning, wherever I woke up, I was always covered in salt. I was cured meat. I had become beef jerky. Even as a small, small child, I knew it would one day come to this.

She told me that for years she had lived in hope of being rescued; of belonging to someone else, of dancing together. And then she had learned to dance alone, for its own sake and for hers.

Islands are metaphors for the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams. And perhaps such a thing is enough. To be a muse may be enough. The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn't understand you. The truth is, you never understood yourself.

He admitted he was in love with her, but he said he loved me.

Translated, that means, I don't want to hurt you yet. Translated, that means, I don't know what to do, give me time.

'You're so simple and good,' he said, brushing the hair from my face.

He meant, Your emotions are not complex like mine. My dilemma is poetic.

But there was no dilemma. He no longer wanted me, but he wanted our life.

He called me Jess becaue that is the name of the hood which restrains the falcon.

I was his falcon. I hung on his arm and fed at his hand.

He said my nose was sharp and cruel and that my eyes had madness in them. He said I would tear him to pieces if he dealt softly with me.

I was none of these things, but I became them.

At night, in June I think, I flew off his wrist and tore his liver from his body, and bit my chain in pieces and left him on the bed with his eyes open.

He looked surprised, I don't know why. As your lover describes you, so you are.

I know that people are afraid of me, eiher for the yapping of my dogs or because I stand taller than any of them. When I was a child my father swung me up on to his knees to tell a story and I broke both his legs. He never touched me again, except with the point of the whip he used for the dogs. But my mother, who lived only a while and was so light that she dared not go out in a wind, could swing me on her back and carry me for miles. There was talk of witchcraft but what is stronger than love?

'But, madam,' screeched the little bit of vermin, 'I see you weigh no more than an angel.'

'You know nothing of the Scriptures,' said I. 'For nowhere in the Holy Book is there anything to be said about the weight of an angel.'

Howard was fifty-seven years old. He had been married for thirty years to a difficult woman. Entering waiting orifices was about as much as he felt he could handle now, in the arena of personal relations.

Zora had specifically worn the shoes she was wearing because she had not anticipated any walking. To make progress she had to grip her brother around his waist, take little pigeon-steps and lean far back on her heels. For a long time Jerome restrained himself from commentary, but at the fourth pit stop he could keep quiet no longer. 'I don't get you. Aren't you meant to be a feminist? Why would you cripple yourself like this?'

'I like these shoes, OK? They actually make me feel powerful.'

And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?

'Do you know how battery chickens live?'

Irie didn't. Joshua explained. Cooped up for most of their poor chicken lives in total chicken darkness, packed together like chicken sardines in their chicken shit and fed the worst type of chicken grain.

And this belief in her ugliness, in her wrongness, had subdued her; she kept her smart-ass comments to herself these days, she kept her right hand on her stomach. She was all wrong.

He had to please all of the people all of the time. [...] Social chameleon. And underneath it all, there remained an ever present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere.

And were they still like that, she wondered – these new girls, this new generation? Did they still feel one thing and do another? Did they still only want to be wanted? Were they still objects of desire instead of – as Howard might put it – desiring subjects? [...] no, she could see no serious change. Still starving themselves, still reading women's magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they think can't be seen, still faking their orgasms with men they dislike, still lying to everybody about everything.

When you are no longer in the sexual universe – when you are supposedly too old, or too big, or simply no longer thought of in that way – apparently a whole new range of male reactions to you come into play. One of them is humour. They find you funny. [...] And this is another thing they do. They flirt with you violently because there is no possibility of it being taken seriously.

The size [of Kiki's bosom] was sexual and at the same time more than sexual: sex was only one small element of its symbolic range. If she were white, maybe it would refer only to sex, but she was not. And so her chest gave off a mass of signals beyond her direct control: sassy, sisterly, predatory, motherly, threatening, comforting – it was a mirror-world she had stepped into in her mid forties, a strange fabulation of the person she believed she was. She could no longer be meek or shy. Her body had directed her to a new personality.

In other words, the claim that woman is what she is because of her uterus is more, or less, true than the subsequent claim that she is what she is because of her ovaries.

Den tørre, harde, mørke nordiske skogen er den beste skogen fordi den er tom. Den nordiske skogen er krisp og ensom og kald, det er fraværet av mennesker som er det vesentlige her, det vet alle som har et forhold til nordisk skog. Det er en slags anarkistisk tomhet i den nordiske skogen, dette har jeg forstått senere, den nordiske naturen er rolig og tom og åpen for alt, slik anarkiet er rolig og tomt og åpent for alt. Slik jeg var rolig og tom og åpen for alt Slaktus fant på å gjøre med meg.

Reiste eg vekk for å lengta heim? Nei, eg reiste vekk for å finna det beste av alt. Det som alle hadde reist ut i verda etter, men kanskje ingen hadde funne endå. Eg visste ikkje kva det var. Men eg trudde lagnaden ville fylla meg opp, og ein dag senda meg heim att med ei rose i munnen og sjela full av ville og glitrande minne.