Bokelskere.no

Appraising myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were Peter Van Houtens - miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were people like my parents, who walked around zombically, doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around.

"Observation: It would be awesome to fly in a superfast airplane that could chase the sunrise around the world for a while."

I could feel everybody watching us, wondering what was wrong with us, and whether it would kill us, and how heroic my mum must be, and everything else. That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people. We were irreconcilably other, and never was it more obvious than when the three of us walked through the empty plane, the stewardess nodding sympathetically and gesturing us toward our row in the distant back.

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

Off topic, but: What a slut time is. She screws everybody.)

To be with him was to hurt him - inevitably. And that's what I'd felt as he reached for me: I'd felt as though I were committing an act of violence against him, because I was.

(...)the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

"There will come a time," I said, "when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this" - I gestured encompassingly - "will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."

Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.)

the impossible encounters that live in the imagination and somehow become reality

the ability of parents to guide their small children around by the tops of their heads

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