Bokelskere.no

I never thought much at the time about what the phrase meant, but it had something to do with metal, with armor, and that's what I would do, I would steel myself. I would pretend not to be present, not in the flesh.

How easy it is to invent humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

Time's a trap, I'm caught in it.

It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavours, in the air or on the tounge, half-colours, too many.

But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh.

The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being belivable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

It isn't running away they're afraid of. We couldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then

Photography is an attempt to capture something fleeting

The best books, they don't talk about things you never thought about before. They talk about things you'd always thought about, but that you didn't think anyone else had thought about. You read them, and suddenly you're a little bit less alone in the world.

As a little kid, Peter had figured out that once you reached a certain age, somebody just handed you all the knowledge you'd need in order to be an adult. But it turned out that wasn't how it worked at all.

There is a will that exist, a desperate, continual, constantly renewed effort to place some people on a level below you, not to be on the lowest rung of the social ladder.

[...] as if youthfulness were in no way a biological fact, a simple question of age, of a moment in life, but rather a sort of privilege reserved for those who are able - thanks to their situation in life- to enjoy all those experiences, all those feeelings that get grouped together under the word adolescence.

From my childhood I have no happy memories. I don't mean to say that I never, in all of those years, felt any happiness or joy. But suffering is all-consuming: it somehow gets rid of anything that doesn't fit into its system

Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity

Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them

I had long since realized that each of us organizes memory as it suits him, I'm still suprised when I do it myself

[...] she wanted everything and pretended to want nothing