Bokelskere.no

Jeg sa til helten ikke å levne bagasje i bilen. Det er en dårlig og populær hobby for folk i Ukraina å ta ting uten å spørre. Jeg har lest at New York City er veldig farlig, men jeg skal si deg at Ukraina er enda mer farlig. Hvis du vil vite hvem som beskytter deg fra folk som tar ting uten å spørre, så er det politiet. Hvis du vil vite hvem som beskytter deg fra politiet, så er det de folkene som tar ting uten å spørre. Og det er hyppig de samme folkene.

Det eneste som er verre enn å komme for sent til ditt eget bryllup er å komme for sent til bryllupet til den kvinnen som skulle ha vært din hustru.

Music is beautiful. Since the beginning of time, we (the Jews) have been looking for a new way of speaking. We often blame our treatment throughout history on terrible misunderstandings. (Words never mean what we want them to mean.) If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand. This was the origin of Torah chanting and, in all likelihood, Yiddish—the most onomatopoeic of all languages. It is also the reason that the elderly among us, particularly those who survived a pogrom, hum so often, indeed seem unable to stop humming, seem dead set on preventing any silence or linguistic meaning in. But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we’ve got. Ifactifice is one such word.

The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.

I'm all alone, he said.
You're not alone, she said, taking his head to her chest.
I am.
You're not alone, she said. You only feel alone.
To feel alone is to be alone. That's what it is.

I must inform you, Jonathan, that I am a very sad person. I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower that your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.

(...)once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.

This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.