Bokelskere.no

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.

We don't rise to the level of our abilities, we fall to the level of our excuses.

John Lennon had said, 'Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.' That sure as hell was true.

Sometimes in every police officer's career a really terrible thing happens. When it does, that is the moment we wonder why the hell we are doing this job. But if we are able to be mentally strong enough, it's also the moment when we realize that's why we chose to do this job. Because all our training kicks in. Not many people phone the police because they are happy. We're not here to serve happy people. We're here to make a difference. Occasionally, however tragic it might be, we give up our lives to do that. Human lifespans are not predictable. Don't ever make the mistake of measuring someone by the length of their life. Measure them by the difference they made to this world.

For all of us, life is a series of journeys, and at the end of each journey, we arrive back at the place we started from, and know it for the first time.

In the early morning, the snow on the mountain peaks was caught by the sun, turning pink before the light penetrated to the valley floor. Then there was the silence. I do not think I have ever before or since heard such peace and deep silence. There were other kinds of silence later, but they were tense and sick with anxiety and violence.
Kashmir filled my mind. Later, it went some way to keeping me whole. If I had had no idea of perfection, I don't know if I would have come through.