Bokelskere.no

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

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

So there it was, out in the open: his wife didn't understand him.
That's what I was there for, then. The same old thing. It was too banal to be true.

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid

A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze