Bokelskere.no

No nostalgia is felt more keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed.

My patience, like my time in this world, grows shorter

When every Arab girl stood in line waiting for God to hand out the desperate-to-get-married gene, I must have been somewhere else, probably lost in a book.

Using Edwardian prose for Dostoyevsky is like adding milk to good tea.

I, like everyone, want explanations. In other words, I extract explanations where none exist.
Imre Kertesz says it well in Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Here you go:
But, it would seem, there is no getting around explanations, we are constantly explaining and excusing ourselves; life itself, that inexplicable complex of being and feeling, demands explanations of us, those around us demand explanations, and in the end we ourselves demand explanations of ourselves, until in the end we succeed in annihilating everything around us, ourselves included, or in other words explain ourselves to death.

These literary dilettantes know books about as well as an airline passenger knows the landscape he overflies; they talk about novels in highlights as if they're reading a fashion magazine.

In the early pages of his gorgeous novel "Sepharad", Antonio Munoz Molina writes: "Only those of us who have left know what the city used to be like and are aware of how much it has changed; it's the people who stayed who can't remember, who seeing it day after day have been losing that memory, allowing it to be distorted, although they think they're the ones who remained faithful, and that we, in a sense, are deserters."
Certainly a beautiful sentence, and a lovely sentiment, but I respectfully yet strenuously disagree. There may be much I can't remember, and my memory may have become distorted along the way, but Beirut and how she was, how she has changed through the years - her, I never forgot, and I have never left her.