Bokelskere.no

You might live on top of the biggest toxic waste dump on the planet, but if you never dig, then all you ever know is that your grass is green and your garden is lush.

I always get the funniest expressions from colleagues when I tell them that the best scientists understand that 2-3 percent of whatever it is they are studying is simply not quantifiable - it may be magic or aliens or random variance, none of which can be truly ruled out. If we are to be honest as scientists ... we must admit there may be a few things that we are not supposed to know.

De første tre årene etter at Karin døde, hadde vært som en vandring gjennom et Salvador Dali-landskap, sett gjennom bunnen av en akevittflaske.

When someone leaves you once, you expect it to happen again. Eventually you stop getting close enough to people to let them become important to you, because then you don't notice when they drop out of your world.

Impatience was a trait you developed in the lower forty-eight, an attribute that a child who grew up here didn't possess. Time wasn't the same on the tundra; it stretched to elastic lengths and snapped back fast when you weren't looking. The only things that really operated on a schedule were school and church, and most Yupiit were late to those anyway.

Superheroes were born in the minds of people desperate to be rescued. The first, and arguably the most legendary, arrived in the 1930s, care of Shuster and Siegel, two unemployed, apprehensive Jewish immigrants who couldn't get work at a newspaper. They imagined a loser who only had to whip off his glasses and step into a phone booth to morph into a paragon of manliness, a world where the geek got the girl at the end. The public, reeling from Depression, embraced Superman, who took them away from a bleak reality.

Life could take on any number of shapes while you were busy fighting your own demons. But if you were changing at the same rate as the person beside you, nothing else really mattered. You became each other's constant.

Som regel ender jeg i en krøll på gulvet mellom bordet og oppvaskbenken. Blir liggende å holde rundt meg selv mens jeg gråter isen ut av brystet. Store blokker av nedfryst liv løsner og går i fossen.

Det fantes ikke noe bak fasaden hos meg. Bare et slags stumt skrik som var frosset fast i knoklene, uten at jeg noen gang tenkte over det. Jeg hadde alltid følelsen av at jeg hadde vært borte den dagen de andre fikk vite hvordan man skal leve.

The tears you shed over a child were not the same as any others. They burned your throat and your corneas. They left you blind.

Relationships always sounded so physically painful: You fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars? The problem with a marriage - or maybe its strength - was that it spanned a distance, and you were never the same person you started out being. If you were lucky, you could still recognize each other years later. If you weren't, you wound up in your office with a boy fifteen years younger than you were, pouring his heart into your open hands.

Betrayal was a stone beneath the mattress of the bed you shared, something you felt digging into you no matter how you shifted position. What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?

You signed no contract to become a parent, but the responsibilities were written in invisible ink. There was a point when you had to support your child, even if no one else would. It was your job to rebuild the bridge, even if your child was the one who burned it in the first place.

There was a fine line between love and hate, you heard that cliché all the time. But no one told you that the moment you crossed it would be the one you least expected. You'd fall in love and crack open a secret door to let your soul mate in. You just never expected such closeness, one day, to feel like an intrusion.