Bokelskere.no

"We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves that we hid from them - they would neer sense the lack or even know there was something more they should be looking for"

"Sometimes it didn't feel like regret. It felt like a missing."

"Songs that overheated my own righteous sadness, my imagined alignment with the tragic nature of our world. How I loved to wring myself out that way, stroking my feelings until they were unbearable. I wanted all of life to feel that frantic and pressurized with portent, so even colors and weather and tastes would be more saturated. That's what the songs promised, what they trawled out of me.

"This absence in me that I could curl around like an animal"

*[...] nothing can compare to the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all - we were wet. *

"It was, of course, a miserable childhoood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while

"How the hours can pass with mere kissing is lost to me now, along with the rest of my youth"

"My chest felt too tight for me to say anything, even that I was sorry"

"He had an irresistible magnetism and an air of secret sorrow, secret knowledge"

"[...] the sadness from which I'd been running was hitting me so hard that I could barely stand upright"

"Everything we have is temporary, the joy, the suffering, everything."

"They had the beauty of the second glance, the beauty that only revealed itself with intimacy"

"She looked like an angel in the one picture I ever saw of her, but there was something empty in her eyes, a deadness, the despair of the disparity between what she looked like and what she felt herself to be."

"...she kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her sense of superiority, which is so often the secret heart of shyness"

"Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by suprise"

"It was as if sadness were a chemical element that everything he touched consisted of"

"That's what everyone thinks," my mother said. "They think they're not like other people. But then life teaches you some lessons."

"Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential"

"My body is betraying me again. Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal"

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even povertry, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.