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Quote by Hanne Ørstavik

“Oh, if only I'd known, I would have looked after her like a little puppy, taken care of her and stayed with her through her days and nights, watching over her, so that she wouldn't have to be alone, caressing and soothing her, feeding her. You, and your tender loving care, Liv. How pathetic.”

Quote by Hanne Ørstavik

Work

The Pastor

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Author

Hanne Ørstavik

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“It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.”

“She had parents. People who loved her. Every human was a hyper-dense node of intense emotional and material investment. Speaking meant someone had spent thousands of hours cooing to you. Those lean muscles, the ringing tone of command - their inputs were from all over the world, carefully administered. The mere was more than a person; like a spaceship launch, her existence implied thousands of skilled people, generations of experts, wars, treaties, scholarship, and supply-chain management. Every one of them was all that.”

“He made me want to take charge of every aspect of his goddamn life. To make sure he ate right, to tuck him into bed on time, to fuck him when he acted up—and needed release. To bully my way into every aspect of his life so that I could ensure he was well-maintained and happy. To put that same dopey, needy look on his face like he was sporting now, all flushed and turned on—embarrassed by his own nature, but desperate to let go. Like I was the only thing that mattered. Like I was his world. And he was trusting me to take care of him.”

“I look over at him and he smiles quietly at me, shaking his head just once. So much is said in that one look, like he knows every fear I have, how it’s killing me to see the Kid nervous, because he’s never nervous. Worried, yeah. But nervous? No fucking way. And if he’s nervous now, it means he’s scared, and it means that I have to go to him. I have to protect him. I have to make it better. It’s my job. It’s who I am. It’s what I’m supposed to fucking do.”