Bokelskere.no

He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.

Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.

Oh, how proper we seem to ourselves when we have no reason to be improper!

It was as if he were avdead man animated by nothing more than a habit of stubborn will.

He felt both shame and pride, and over it all a bitter dissapointment, in himself and in the time and circumstance that made him possible.

He found within himself a capacity for violence he did not know he had: he yearned for involvement, he wished for the taste of death, the bitter joy of destruction, the feel of blood.

The dying are selfish, he thought; they want their moments to themselves, like children.

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

[...] he felt the logic of grammar, and he thought he perceived how it spread out from itself, permeating the language and supporting human thought.

Stoner merket at han overvar en bløff så kolossal og dristig at han var fullstendig uforberedt på å håndtere den