Bokelskere.no

we have narrowed it down to
the butcherknife and the
mockingbird.
wish us
luck.

but this is different; you dislike everything that I like.

no, I said, I just don't like the way you like them

"Det er fuglemoren som lærer barna å synge, " sa Eri. Så smilte hun. "Jeg hadde aldri tenkt over det før jeg kom hit. At også fugler må lære å synge."

Men skulle man være presis, var det ikke noe smilehull. Det var en ørliten grop for godmodige syrligheter.

...one of those hangovers where you see yourself in the mirror and think you look familiar.

He became his own blues son, a Tom Waits loser, a Kerouac saint, a Springsteen hero under the lights of the American highway and the neon glow of the American strip. A fugitive, a sharecropper, a hobo, a cowboy who knows that he's running out of prairie but rides anyway because there's nothing left but to ride.

Løgnen er kanskje som brennevin, tenkte jeg. Du må drikke jevnt for å skjule for deg sjøl at du drikker. Men kanskje har sannheten noe lignende ved seg. At en må drikke til flaska er tom.

Det finnes to måter å se et glass på, Dag, men livet ... vil alltid være halvtomt.

I now idealism is not playing on the radio right now (...). You don't see it on TV, irony is on heavy rotation, the knowingness, the smirk, the tired joke. I've tried them all out. Idealism is under siege, beset by materialism, narcissism, and all the other isms of indifference.

You can't have the benefits of globalization without the responsibilities.

Africa defies all concepts that we hold to be true: our concept of neigbor, our concept of civilization, our concept of equality, of love. I mean, you can just forget about it. What Africa says about Europe and America is withering. It says we've built our Houses of Parliment and government on sand, because if we really believed the things we say we believe, we would not let 23 million Africans die of AIDS. You can't have the benefits of globalization without the responsibilities.

He wasn't naive; he knew when to say no. It was just that he didn't always think being spun a yarn was a good enough reason for not doing what he could to help.

Nothing epitomizes the futility of human striving quite like aspartame,"she says and sips

... and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

My own theory - or one of them - was that once you started to hit middle age, you became so jaded and unsurprised by life that you had to have a child in order to provide yourself with a new set of eyes through which to view things, to make them seem new and exciting again.

Cars are like people. We mill around every day, we rush here and there, we come within inches of touching each other but very little real contact goes on. All those near misses. All those might-have-beens.

"What's happened?", she asked. "Nothing yet," I told her. "But I can't speak for later."