Bokelskere.no

going to sleep with a line through every item on the things-to-do-list

getting warm by a fire or in his arms with something to eat or drink after you've been in the rain or snow

Jeg holdt glasset med begge hender og jeg var så våken, så trøtt og våken samtidig, i glasset lå to isbiter, det var mørkt ute, det rant regn på rutene, og vi var så stille, for vi var aleine.

Det var ikke vanskelig å være tapper. Det var bare å gå rundt i det huset og være som jeg var.

For alt bare fortsetter. Fuglene i snøen og solen som kommer opp. Og skisporene mine og veden, og tallerkenene som blir skitne, alt bare fortsetter.

Ville alt vært annerledes om dette aldri var skjedd? Sånn: Kunne jeg sluppet det mørke hvis jeg ikke hadde sett det lyse?

Men jeg må si: Jeg var så rar på den tida. For hjemme la jeg meg bare i senga, jeg hadde Lila bak øyelokkene, jeg var så dum på den tida. Jeg bare tenkte på hva jeg skulle spørre om, og så tenkte jeg ikke mer - bare sykla til og fra, gjorde leksene i storefri og brukte kveldene til å drømme.

And he understood then just how little effort it would take to make the pain stop - to take all the pain he ever had had, all the pain he ever would have, and make it all go away for ever and ever. He pushed his hands deep into his pockets, and took a deep breath. It would be so easy. A moment of pain, and then it would all be over and done...

Door scratched her nose. "There are little bubbles of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber," she explained. "There's a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere - it doesn't all get used up at once." "I may still be hung over," sighed Richard. "That almost made sense."

Richard did not believe in angels. He never had believed in angels. He was damned if he was going to start now. Still, it was much easier not to believe in something when it is not actually looking directly at you, and saying your name.

His life so far, he decided, had prepared him perfectly for a job in Securities, for shopping at the supermarket, for watching football on the telly at the weekends, for turning on a heater if he got cold. It had magnificently failed to prepare him for a life as an un-person on the roofs and in the sewers of London, for a life in the cold and the wet and the dark.

"Is there anything, really, to be scared of?" "Only the night on the bridge," she said. "The kind in armour?" "The kind that comes when days is over."

She looked at him rather sadly, like a mother trying to explain to an infant that, yes this flame was hot, too. All flames were hot. Trust her, please.

He watched a little Sunday afternoon television and constructed conversations with Jessica in his head. At the end of each mental conversation they would make wild, angry, tearstained and passionate love; and then everything would be all right.

Some day no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost, but with a shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.

The times that were the most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realised how utterly, totally gone she was.

More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness, and then I leaned forward, my forehead against the back of Takumi's headrest, and I cried, whimpering, and I didn't even feel sadness so much as pain. It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

There comes a time when we realise that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow - that, in short, we are all going.

In the long quiet that followed, as we passed around the wine and slowly became drunker, I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too! I want to go too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going."

People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.