Bokelskere.no

If concealment is the single weapon, then a villain is never a villain: one smiles to the very end.

The world was a frightening place, yes, he knew: unlasting, what could be forever? or only what it seemed? rock corrodes, rivers freeze, fruit rots; stabbed, blood of black and white bleeds alike; trained parrots tell more truth than most, and who is lonelier: the hawk or the worm? every flowering heart shrivels dry and pitted as the herb from which it bloomed, and while the old man grows spinsterish, his wife assumes a moustache; moment to moment changing, changing, like the cars on the ferris wheel.

Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.

Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only.

You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said.
The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said. I don't. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.

You reckon there are just some places the good lord didn't intend folks to live in?
Could be, said the sheriff. He's got a bullheaded bunch to deal with here if it's so though, ain't he?
Damned if he don't.

In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.

All the trouble I ever was in, said Ballard, was caused by whiskey or women or both.

Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shone across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn't see it, because they had no other choice.

It's the human condition to be confused. No other animal ever had an erroneous thought about nature. Who knows what our version of the six-thousand-year-old earth is. It's hiding somewhere in plain sight. In five hundred years there'll be two or three things we believed and went on about at great length with perfect assurance that will seem hilarious to them.

The New World had a way of never being new. Ever notice this? I don't mean the Native Americans—that part's obvious. Even in European terms, somebody was always already there. The first person De Soto met in Florida spoke Spanish. Was in fact a Spaniard! And was it the Plymouth voyage that had aboard a group of Indians coming back from a visit to London?

That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

"I'm not going to die," she said. "Not till I've seen it."
"Seen what?"
Her smile widened. "Everything."