Bokelskere.no

But, for now it was still eight o'clock, and as I walked along the avenue under that brilliant blue sky, I was happy, my friends, as happy as any man who has ever lived.

Om jeg husker dagen i det hele tatt, er det bare som et usammensatt puslespill, en mengde isolerte inntrykk. En bit blå himmel her, en hengebjørk der, med sollyset reflektert i treets bark. Skyer som ligner menneskeansikter, verdenskart, tibente fantasidyr. Det plutselige glimtet av en stålorm som snor seg gjennom gresset. Firetonersklangen til en usynlig spottefugl. De tusen bladene på en asp som flagrer lik sårede møll i det vinteren glir mellom grenene. Enkeltvis er elementene på plass, men helheten mangler, delene henger ikke sammen, og jeg kan ikke gjøre annet enn å lete etter levningene av en dag som ikke eksisterer fullt ut.

Eventually, we would all die, and when our bodies were carried off and buried in the ground, only our friends and family would know we were gone. Our death’s wouldn’t be announced on radio or television. There wouldn’t be any obituaries in the New York Times. No books would be written about us.

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head.

Gliding through Times Square at three-thirty in the morning, and all the traffic is gone, and suddenly you're alone in the center of the world, with neon raining down on you from every corner of the sky. Or pushing the speedometer up past seventy on the Belt Parkway just before dawn and smelling the ocean as it pours in on you through the open window. Or traveling across the Brooklyn Bridge at the very moment a full moon rises into the arch, and that's all you can see, the bright yellow roundness of the moon, so big that it frightens you, and you forget that you live down here on earth and imagine you're flying, that the cab has wings and you're actually flying through space. No book can duplicate those things.

Lesning var min flukt og min glede, min trøst og foretrukne stimulans; jeg leste av ren nytelse, og elsket den herlige stillheten som omgir en når man hører forfatterens ord gjenlyde inne i hodet.

I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain.

When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.