Bokelskere.no

We name children after the dead in the dim hope that they will resemble them, pretending to blunt the loss of the person we knew while struggling to make the person we don't know into less of a stranger.

She laughed, but did not promise. Instead she pressed her mouth to his, and he breathed her in, trust pouring back into his silent ribs, into the cage that held his heart

The room filled with black ink, deep and wondrous pools of dark liquid beauty that seeped into the spaces between her fingers and arms and lips. And the darkness between her tongue and the roof of her mouth was flooded with color and light.

His dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of a truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come that his parents had always talked about was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world to come -the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.

Tiny secret blueprints of their parents were floating within her, growing, invisible and silent, engineering a soul. Every pregnant woman was carrying the dead.

The silence in the house had smothered Ben for the past six months (...) On the days after the funeral when he had woken up in the morning in the old bed, he felt it resting on his upper lip, collecting in the dent below his nose during the confusion between sleep and waking.

Being in love is... anxious, he said. Wanting to please, worrying that she will see me as I really am. But wanting to be known. That is... you're naked, moaning in the dark, no dignity at all... I wanted her to see me and to love me even though she knew everything I am, and I knew her. Now she's gone, and my knowledge is incomplete.

Do you know about phantom-limb syndrome? Julia nodded. There's pain where she ought to be. It's feeding the other pain.

He was not ready for her absence, No one he loved had died, until Elspeth. Other people were absent, but no one was dead. Elspeth? Even her name seemed empty, as though it had detached itself from her and was floating untethered in his mind. How am I supposed to live without you? It was not the matter of the body; his body would carry on as usual. The problem was located in the word how: he would live, but without Elspeth the flavour, the manner, the method of living were lost to him. He would have to relearn solitude.

"M. Poirot," she said with outstretched hand. Her eye ran rapidly over the dandified figure. She paused a minute, ignoring the little man's bow over her hand, and his murmured "My Lady," and then releasing his hand after a sudden vigorous pressure, she exclaimed: "I believe in small men! They are the clever ones."