Bokelskere.no

God was nowhere, he said to himself, but life was everywhere, and death was everywhere, and the living and the dead were joined.

Being young, Mary replied. That's the only thing that was ever wrong with you. You were young, and you though the thoughts of an undeveloped young person with a big heart and an overdeveloped case of youthful idealism. Now you're not so young anymore, and you've stopped thinking that way.

The best thing about being fifteen is that you don't have to be fifteen for more than a year.

He's so proud of you, Archie, his mother said. He just doesn't know what to say or how to say it. He's a man who never learned how to talk.

A crowd could sometimes express a hidden truth that no one person in the crowd would have dared to express on his own.

He understood that fourteen was the worst possible age on the calendar of human life, and therefore all fourteen-year-olds were confused and fractured beings, not one of them a child anymore and not one of them an adult, none quite right in the head or at home in his unfinished body.

War announces the beginning of a new reality, but nothing had begun that day, a reality had ended, that was all, something had been subtracted from the world, and now there was a hole, a nothing where there had once been a something, as if every tree in the world had vanished, as if the very concept of tree or mountain or moon had been erased from the human mind.

Let the woman behind him sob her heart out, it probably made her feel better, but he would never feel better and therefore he didn't have the right to cry, he only had the right to think, to try to understand what was happening, this big thing that resembled nothing else that ever happened to him.

That was perhaps their greatest bond, the need for music that ran through their bodies, which at that point in their lives was no different from the need to find a way to exist in the world.

What a curious pair they were - a wounded boy screaming love with each act of hostility towards his father and a wounded father emanating love by not slapping him down, by letting himself be punched.