Bokelskere.no

The real suffering came when no one was looking, during those 179 long days. The unoccupied afternoons in a quiet house, when worry silently engulfed us. The intense awareness of time, the heaviness of the passing minutes, the dizzying, trippy sense that the days were both too few and too long.

There is a rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea – "the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty."

Life goes on, probably too long if we're being honest about it. In a long life there are thirty or thirty-five thousand days to be got through, but only a few dozen that really matter, Big Days when Something Momentous Happens. The rest – the vast majority, tens of thousands of days – are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. We glide through them then instantly forget them. We tend not to think about this arithmetic when we look back on our lives. We remember the handful of Big Days and throw away the rest. We organize our long, shapeless lives into tidy little stories, as I am doing here. But our lives are mostly made up of junk, of ordinary, forgettable days, and “The End” is never the end.

She had stood still in the quiet, determined way that people who are sure of themselves, and have never been exposed to influences outside their circle, can sometimes do for their entire lives.

Don't Give Me Attitude, I Have One of My Own.

We parents often talk with ridiculous bravado when it comes to our kids. We swear that we can take any abuse, beat any challenge. No test is too great. Anything for our kids. But no one is bulletproof, parents least of all. Our kids make us vulnerable.

Every father knows the disconcerting moment when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self, stand right up in front of you, made real and flesh. He is you and not you, familiar and strange. He is you restarted, rewound; at the same time he is as foreign and unknowable as any other person.

Treat a man like an anvil and he will long to hit back.

As a couple, we believed that you raise a child with good values and then you give him space, you trust him to behave responsibly, at least until he gives you reason not to.

The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not.

It turns out, you can get used to most anything. What one day seems a shocking, unbearable outrage over time comes to seem ordinary, unremarkable.

We humans are swayed more by stories than by abstract concepts like "burden of proof" or "presumed innocent." We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls.

I'm just saying, you can love your child and still see his flaws. You have to see his flaws, otherwise how can you help him?

His mouth was overstuffed with teeth; he had to force it shut, like a full suitcase, which left him with a sour, pucker-mouthed expression.

Oscar Wilde is my hero when it comes to time. He was always unpunctual. One time when he arrived exceptionally late for a dinner party the hostess angrily pointed at the clock on the wall and said, "Mr Wilde, are you aware what the time is?" And he replied, "My dear lady, pray tell me, how can that nasty little machine possibly know what the great golden sun is up to?"

A mind once expanded can never return to its original dimensions.

Branson ate his salad, and left the rest of his fish untouched, while Grace tucked into his steak and kidney pudding with relish. 'I read a while ago,' he told Branson, 'that the French drink more red wine than the English but live longer. The Japanese eat more fish than the English, but drink less wine and live longer. The Germans eat more red meat than the English, and drink more beer, and they live longer, too. You know the moral of this story?'
'No.'
'It's not what you eat or drink - it's speaking English that kills you.'

It's not what you eat, it's worrying about what you eat. Worry is the killer.