Bokelskere.no

In Miss Chen's English class, we learned, 'To be or not to be...' but there's a big gray area in between. Maybe in Shakespeare times people only had two options.

Some people were born just so they could be buried.

Unless he had whiskey running through his veins, Willard came to the clearing every morning and evening to talk to God. Arvin didn't know which was worse, the drinking or the praying. As far back as he could remember, it seemed that his father had fought the Devil all the time.

John Bray had, besides his red sweater, a dirty suede jacket and the face of a thief.

“Not a bad climb,” Rand said.
“As the woman on the bus said when she saw the Pacific for the first time …”
“Yes?”
“I imagined it would be bigger.”

There are two Los Angeleses, they like to say, sometimes more, but in fact there is only one, six lanes wide with distant palms and one end vanishing in the sea.

Beneath them the minister, staring upward, was holding the fallen broom. “Is everything all right?” he called. He was a modern figure who disdained holy appearance; he drove a Porsche and mingled passages from various best-sellers with prayers for the dead.

“I’m basically a happy man. No. There’s no basically about it. I’m happy. I am a happy man.”

There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went "what?" Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, "Wha--?" It had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake.

"Hey, cutie," he would call to her from the stairs, after not having looked her in the eye for two months. It was like being snowbound with someone's demented uncle: Should marriage be like that? She wasn't sure.

Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke.

Do I fight? I don't fight I just, well, OK: I ask a few questions from time to time. I ask, 'What the hell are you doing?' I ask 'Are you trying to asphyxiate your entire family?' I ask 'Did you hear me?' Then I ask, 'Did you hear me?' again. Then I ask, 'Are you deaf?' I also ask, 'What do you think a marriage is? I'm really just curious to know,' and also, 'Is this your idea of a well-ventilated place?' A simple interview, really.

Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star in a full-blown one of her own, he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.

Yes, sitting on the very edge of the chair looking over the roofs of Eastbourne, Minnie Marsh prays to God. That's all very well; and she may rub the pane too, as though to see God better; but what God does she see? Who's the God of Minnie Marsh, the God of the back streets of Eastbourne, the God of three o'clock in the afternoon? I, too, see roofs, I see sky; but, oh, dear—this seeing of Gods! More like President Kruger than Prince Albert—that's the best I can do for him; and I see him on a chair, in a black frock-coat, not so very high up either; I can manage a cloud or two for him to sit on; and then his hand trailing in the cloud holds a rod, a truncheon is it?—black, thick, thorned—a brutal old bully—Minnie's God! Did he send the itch and the patch and the twitch? Is that why she prays? What she rubs on the window is the stain of sin. Oh, she committed some crime! (Fra An unwritten novel)