Bokelskere.no

Though she be but little, she is fierce!

If you lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it.
And if you didn't, you will never understand.

Alkohol gir deg ingen nye tanker, den får deg bare til å si det du allerede tenker, men har vett til å holde kjeft om når du er edru.

Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you – and it will find you.

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.

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

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.