Bokelskere.no

Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don't take naturally to it.

What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore, it knows it's not foolin' a soul.

"This land was brought up from the depths of the ocean by a diver," said the fire. "It was spun from its own substance by a spider. It was shat by a raven. It is the body of a fallen father, whose eyes are lakes. This is a land of dreams and fire," said the flame.

Det har aldri vært en sann krig som ikke ble kjempet mellom to grupper mennesker som var sikre på at de hadde rett. De virkelig farlige menneskene tror at de gjør det de gjør ene og alene fordi det uten tvil er det rette.Og det er det som gjør dem farlige.

"Dette er det eneste landet i verden, " sa Onsdag ut i stillheten, "som bekymrer seg for hva det er."
"Hva?"
"Resten av dem vet hva de er. Ingen trenger noen gang å gå på leting etter hjertet av Norge. Eller se etter sjelen til Mosambik. De vet hva de er."

We need individual stories. Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, 'casualities may rise to a million'. With individual stories, the statistics become people - but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child. And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we must resume our lives.
A life, which is, like any other, unlike any other.

The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
'Say "Nevermore",' said Shadow.
'Fuck you,' said the raven.

'They've got no money,' said Jacquel when they were back in the hearse. 'He'll come in to see Ibis tomorrow. He'll choose the cheapest funeral. Her friends will persuade him to do her right, give her a proper sendoff in the front room, I expect. But he'll grumble. Got no money. Nobody around here's got money these days. Anyway, he'll be dead in six months. A year on the outside.'
Snowflakes tumbled and drifted in front of the headlights. The snow was coming south. Shadow said, 'Is he sick?'
'It ain't that. Women survive their men. Men - men like him - don't live long when their women are gone. You'll see - he'll just start wandering, all the familiar things are going to be gone with her. He gets tired and he fades and then he gives up and then he's gone. Maybe pneumonia will take him or maybe it'll be cancer, or maybe his heart will stop. Old age, and all the fight gone out of you. Then you die.'

He wonders wether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while; or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.

Death had vanished from the streets of America, thought Shadow; now it happened in hospital rooms and in ambulances. We must not startle the living, thought Shadow.