We will not follow the smoke to the stars until we are burned on the pyre of the earth. Love is the war to end all wars, and the war is upon us.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization that everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner, and one hot July week in Oxford I was moved to spend an afternoon walking the graveyard looking for his stone, a kind of courtesy call on the owner of the property. A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of flesh and bone, fiber and licquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me.

Når vi sover, elsker vi med de døde.

De dødes drømmer, det er kanskje oss.

Living with someone you love can be lonelier – than living entirely alone! – if the one that y' love doesn't love you...

Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

Some fathers hate to read but love to take the family on trips. Some children hate trips but love to read. Funny how often these find themselves passengers in the same automobile. I glimpsed the stupendous clear-cut shoulders of the Rockies from between paragraphs of Madam Bovary. Cloud shadows roved languidly across her huge rock throat, traced her fir flanks. Since those days I do not look at hair on female flesh without thinking, Deciduous?

Pattedyr har en altruistisk impuls , skriver Frans de Waal,og det er mulig å observere empati hos fugler. Godhet finnews, medfølelse og solidaritet er lett å observere f.eksw hos elefanter, aper, fugler. Noen ganger også hos mennesker.

det eneste diktet ville befatte seg med den sommeren
var trær, løv, greiner
og skyggene av alt som kan oppsummeres
i ord som trær, løv og greiner
skyggene av greiner som vrir seg vekk fra greinene
skyggene av alt som finnes og som ikke får plass
i ord som oppriktig, uferdig, forventning og sorg

....
Hun fant problemer i ansiktet på kjæresten sin
Med en liten pinsett plukket hun problemer
fra pannen og neseryggen hans
Han likte det, han likte å bli kjent og plukket på
og hun likte også å finne problemer overalt hvor de vokste frem
....
Levende uløselige problemer
som ingen kan klare seg uten

Å glede seg.Å være et barn som gleder seg hele uka til at det skal bli lørdag, hele vinteren til at det skal bli sommer.Noe som blir borte for deg. Hva var det du gledet deg til?Hva var det å glede seg til? Å være en voksen kvinne som tar på seg kjolen om morgenen, den kjolen som alltid var så fin før. Å være den mannen som ikke klarer å svare.