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Quote by Lailah Gifty Akita

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Lailah Gifty Akita

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“For a long while, he sat on the steps and sharpened the chain-saw blade with a round file, dipping it in bar-and-chain oil and raking it over each tooth with sleek, grating sounds. He lost himself in the rhythm of the labor. A victory over tears is a small thing, but it was his. The sky went from indigo to blackness, and he saw nothing ominous in it, nothing but cold stars wheeling in their course, a course determined by the same firm hand he hoped was guiding his own. But satellites, too, crossed the sky in sly, winking arcs. Sull knew that. He could not let himself be confounded. He went inside, to sleep beside his wife.”

“And while he sat there on the end of the jetty, he’d let the sound of the waves fill his ears, watch the clouds and schools of tiny sweetfish, take pebbles he’d pocketed on the way and throw them out into the deep. Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting “out there” was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in.”

“In the streets outside everything was still. The hour before five was the only time of day this city slept. In my earlier life, during the twelve years I had lived in Bergen I used to stay up at night as often as I could. I never reflected on this, it was just something I liked and did. It had started as a student ideal, grounded in a notion that in some way night was associated with freedom. Not in itself but as a response to the nine-to-four reality which I, and a couple of others, regarded as middle-class and conformist. We wanted to be free, we stayed up at night. Continuing with this had less to do with freedom than a growing need to be alone. This, I understood now, I shared with my father. In the house where we lived he had a whole studio apartment to himself and he spent more or less every evening there. The night was his.”