Bokelskere.no

I suppose we are all the products of our parent's joy and suffering.

It's odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another.

Every story we tell about ourselves can only be told in the past tense. It winds backward from where we now stand, no longer the actors in the story but its spectators who have chosen to speak.

I knew what I was seeing: dry grief, grief grown old and familiar. It enters your bones and lives there, because it has no use for flesh, and after a while you feel that you're all bone, hard and dessicated, like a skeleton in a classroom.

People imagine that hope has degrees, but I think not. There is hope and there is no hope.

[...] a Scandinavian trait inherited from a long line of people who had believed in suffering alone.

Being alive is inexplicable, I thought. Consciousness itself is inexplicable. There is nothing ordinary in the world.

We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

My mother and I choked on his silence, but we never interrupted it by speaking.

I had the sense that she was always somewhere ahead of me, and that I was running after her. I would look down at the blond hairs on her slender arm and ask myself what it was about her I couldn't grasp