Bokelskere.no

She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.

When we met, he wore glasses he'd had for fifteen years. I had the same bangs I did in college. I used to plot to break those glasses secretly, but I never told him how much I hated them until the day he came home with new ones.
I think it was a year later that I grew out my bangs. When they were finally gone, he said, "I've always hated bangs actually."

Our beautiful Italian babysitter tells me she broke up with her boyfriend. I know him, a serious young musician who adored her. "What did he do?" I say. She makes herself a cup of tea. "He cried like a clown."

There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.

They felt small, half afraid, childish and wondering, like Adam and Eve when they lost their innocence and realised the magnificence of the power which drove them out of Paradise and across the great night and the great day of humanity.

The past is always a collection of memories, very precarious memories, because they are never real. On this subject I heard Borges himself say something very beautiful and moving.

I heard Borges say he remembered one evening his father had told him something very sad about memory, he'd said: "I thought I could remember my childhood when I first arrived in Buenos Aires, but now I know I can't, because I think if I remember something, for example, if today I remember something from this morning, I get an image of what I saw this morning. But if tonight I remember that thing from this morning, then what I remember is not the first image I had of that thing, but the first remembered image. And so each time I remember something, I am not really remembering it, but rather I am remembering the last time I remembered it, I am remembering the last memory. So in reality I have absolutely no memories or images of my childhood, of my youth."

A quote from Rilke: "Scale the depths of things; irony will never descend there." And one from Jules Renard: "Irony is humanity's sense of propriety." I'm going to be honest: I think both quotes, debatable though they might seem, are perfect. But the one I like best is my own: "Irony is the highest form of sincerity."

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.