Bokelskere.no

"Sometimes I get so excited thinking about my morning coffee," Mr. Söderblad said, "I can't fall asleep at night."

Finally he abandoned the Italian idea altogether and fixed on the only other lunch he could think of - a salad of wild rice, avocado, and smoked turkey breast. The problem then was to find ripe avocados. In store after store he found either no avocados or walnut-hard avocados. He found ripe avocados that were the size of limes and cost $3.89 apiece. He stood holding five of them and considered what to do. He put them down and picked them up and put them down and couldn't pull the trigger. He weathered a spasm of hatred of Denise for having guilted him into inviting his parents to lunch. He had the feeling that he'd never eaten anything in his life but wild-rice salad and tortellini, so blank was his culinary imagination.

He lowered the blinds and drank the wine, and brought himself off again and again, and ate two more cupcakes, detecting peppermint in them, a faint buttery peppermint, before he slept.

[...] he suspected that the minimum price of further conversation with her would be an overpriced lunch of mesquite-grilled autumn vegetables and a bottle of Sancerre for which he had no conceivable way of paying.

In Denise's kitchen, after shopping, she peeled potatoes immaculately or rolled out simple doughs while the cook contrived lagniappes for a child's palate: wedges of pear, strips of homemade mortadella, elderberry sorbet in a doll-size bowl of elderberry soup, lambsmeat ravioli Xed with mint-charged olice oil, cubes of fried polenta.

She'd quit school and worked to save money for a year, had taken six months in France and Italy, and had returned to Philly to cook at a thronged fish-and-pasta place off Catharine Street.

She taught them how to make spinach pasta and how to tango.

"There's a poached salmon in the fridge. A crème fraîche with sorrel. A salad with green beans and hazelnuts. You'll se the wine and baguette and the butter. It's good fresh butter from Vermont."

I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods

Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees
Hum in the lime-tree flowers; and put away
The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness

That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile

Tara uprooted, and new commonness
Upon the throne and crying about the streets
And hanging its paper flowers from post to post,
Because it is alone of all things happy.
I am contented, for I know that Quiet

Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart
Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer,

Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs
A cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-lee.

For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,

A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss

I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew.
But flame on flame, and deep on deep,
Throne over throne where in half sleep,

Their swords upon their iron knees,

Brood her high lonely mysteries.

Og måtte rosensykens ild
I tunger små som kingelspinn
Og kvikksølvgift og råtten krill
I deres rumper trenge inn;

The people in flight from the terror behind – strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.

Andre este ut i størrelsen på det lemmet som kalles naturens plogmann, slik at den ble helt utrolig lang, stor, svær, kraftig, sterk og staut i antikk stil, så til de grader at de kunne bruke den som belte idet de surret den fem-seks ganger rundt kroppen. Og hvis man så dem når de var på sitt beste og hadde vinden i ryggen, så skulle man ha trodd at de hadde sin lanse i angrepsposisjon for å stikke ned turnerningsdukken. Men denne slekten er utdødd etter hva kvinnene sier, for de klager hele tiden over at: De finnes ikke lenger disse svære, osv.

Da sa en av kvinnene med profetisk patos, «Han er født med full hårvekst. Han kommer til å utrette store ting, og hvis han lever lenge, kommer han til å bli gammel.»

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it.

The first lie Julio told Emilia was that he had read Marcel Proust. He didn't usually lie about reading, but that second night, when they both knew they were starting something, and that that something, however long it lasted, was going to be important, that night Julio made hos voice resonant and feigned intimacy, and said that yes, he had read Proust, at the age of seventeen, one summer, in Quintero. At that time no one spent their summers in Quintero anymore, not even Julio's parents, who had met on the beach at El Durazno, who went to Quintero, a pretty beach town now invaded by slum dwellers, where Julio, at seventeen, got his hands on his grandparents' house and locked himself up to read In Search of Lost Time. It was a lie, of course: ha had gone to Quintero that summer, and he had read a lot, but he had read Jack Kerouac, Heinrich Böll, Vladimir Nabokov, Truman Capote, and Enrique Lihn, and not Marcel Proust.

That same night Emilia lied to Juliofor the first time, and the lie was, also, that she had read Marcel Proust.