Bokelskere.no

It was not Death, for I stood up,
And all the Dead, lie down—
It was not Night, for all the Bells
Put out their Tongues, for Noon.

It was not Frost, for on my Flesh
I felt Sirocos—crawl—
Nor Fire—for just my Marble feet
Could keep a Chancel, cool—

And yet, it tasted, like them all,
The Figures I have seen
Set orderly, for Burial,
Reminded me, of mine—

As if my life were shaven,
And fitted to a frame,
And could not breathe without a key,
And ‘twas like Midnight, some—

When everything that ticked—has stopped—
And Space stares all around—
Or Grisly frosts—first Autumn morns,
Repeal the Beating Ground—

To his son and his daughter he was a loving but bad father. To his own parents he had been an ungrateful child.To his country, an indifferent citizen. To his brothers and his sister, affectionate but remote. With his friends, an egotist. With love, lazy. With brightness, dull. With power, passive. With his own soul, evasive.

There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went "what?" Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, "Wha--?" It had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake.

"Hey, cutie," he would call to her from the stairs, after not having looked her in the eye for two months. It was like being snowbound with someone's demented uncle: Should marriage be like that? She wasn't sure.

Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke.

Do I fight? I don't fight I just, well, OK: I ask a few questions from time to time. I ask, 'What the hell are you doing?' I ask 'Are you trying to asphyxiate your entire family?' I ask 'Did you hear me?' Then I ask, 'Did you hear me?' again. Then I ask, 'Are you deaf?' I also ask, 'What do you think a marriage is? I'm really just curious to know,' and also, 'Is this your idea of a well-ventilated place?' A simple interview, really.

Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star in a full-blown one of her own, he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.

Yes, sitting on the very edge of the chair looking over the roofs of Eastbourne, Minnie Marsh prays to God. That's all very well; and she may rub the pane too, as though to see God better; but what God does she see? Who's the God of Minnie Marsh, the God of the back streets of Eastbourne, the God of three o'clock in the afternoon? I, too, see roofs, I see sky; but, oh, dear—this seeing of Gods! More like President Kruger than Prince Albert—that's the best I can do for him; and I see him on a chair, in a black frock-coat, not so very high up either; I can manage a cloud or two for him to sit on; and then his hand trailing in the cloud holds a rod, a truncheon is it?—black, thick, thorned—a brutal old bully—Minnie's God! Did he send the itch and the patch and the twitch? Is that why she prays? What she rubs on the window is the stain of sin. Oh, she committed some crime! (Fra An unwritten novel)

"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in the corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there [...] Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

"Han [Heathcliff] er utenkelig, sier vi, og likevel er ingen gutt i litteraturen mer intenst levende enn han. Slik er det med de to Catherinene også; ingen kvinne føler som dem og oppfører seg som dem, sier vi. Ikke desto mindre er de de mest elskelige kvinnene i engelsk romanlitteratur. Det er som om hun [Emily Brontë] kunne rive i filler alt som kjennetegner oss mennesker og fylle disse ugjenkjennelige, gjennombrutte formene med liv så sterkt at de overgår virkeligheten. Hun eide den sjeldneste av alle evner. Hun kunne befri livet fra dets avhengighet av fakta; med et par grep antyde et ansikts sjel slik at det ikke trenger noen kropp; fortelle om heiene så vinden blåser og tordenen drønner."

You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character. I find marks against all those sentences which seem to express a sardonic yet passionate nature; a mothlike impetuosity dashing itself against hard glass. You thought, as you drew your pencil there, “I too throw off my cloak like that. I too snap my fingers in the face of destiny.” Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table – it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-handkerchief. You then stuff your handkerchief back into your pocket – that is not Byron; that is you; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years’ time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.

"Har hun ikke vært sånn, ja slett og rett et offentlig fruentimmer?" spurte Henny med en grimase. "Nei da, Henny, så galt har det langtifra vært! Men selv om så var - vi gifter oss jo alle sammen med så å si offentlige mannstimmere."