Bokelskere.no

This is the best thing about men's friendships: most any awkwardness can be ignored by mutual agreement and, true connection being unimaginable, you can get on with the easier business of parallel living.

I have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known.

It is a childish realization, I admit – no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed – but after all, we were children.

Do you know what bothers me, Andy? About being here, in this place? It's that for a while – for a few minutes, maybe just a few seconds, I don't know how long – but for some amount of time my son was alive here. He was out there lying in some fucking wet leaves, bleeding to death. And I wasn't here with him. I was supposed to be here to help him. That's what a father does. But I didn't know. I was off somewhere, in the car, in my office, talking on the phone, whatever it was I was doing. Do you understand that, Andy? Do you have any idea how that feels? Can you even imagine it? I saw him get born, I saw him take his first steps and … and learn to ride a bike. I took him to his first day of school. But I wasn't here to help him when he died. Can you imagine how that feels?

It is the policeman's dilemma: sometimes you can't prove the case without a confession, but you can't get a confession unless you already have proof.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It is the happy lot of defense lawyers to see the good in people. No matter how wicked or incomprehensible the crime, no matter how overwhelming the evidence of guilt, the defense lawyer never forgets his client is a human being like the rest of us. That, of course, is what makes every defendant worth defending.

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?