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I morse Nourdine kom förbi redan på morgonen. Han hade med sig texten til pjäsen som kan kanske får roll i. Också i påsen han hade två oöpnade ciggpaket och typ en halvkilo pistagenötter. Pappa ställde fram askfat och stängde ut solljus med persienner. Nourdine kavlade skjortan ocj gjorde adndingsöving så det lät som när gussar ska föda barn. Under tiden jag och pappa hjälpte att översätta dom svåra svenska orden. Pjäsen hette Per Gynt men egentligen jag tycker Per Tönt var bättre namn. Det är en norrman som skrivit den för flera hundra år sen så därfor språket var tjockt skumt. Personerna kallades till exempel «säterjänta» och «knappstöpare». När någon jiddrade dom sa «nu är du tossig» och när dom skulle svara tilbake dom sa elaka ord som «tölp» eller «gaphals» eller «vingelpetter».

Vissa gånger jag kände pappa tittade med besvikelse eftersom jag inte kunde alla svårord. Men efter lite tänkande och med ordböker vi oftast fattade vad dom ville säga. Pjäsen verkade fett konstig. Per-tönten raggade lite på några gussar och hängde runt med trollfamilj och träffade en snubbe som het Böjgen (nej inte bögen). Sen han var på sjön och i öknen och i slutet han kom hem som gubbe och ångrade allt han gjort i livet.

— Ett öga rött by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Hamadi Khemiri (Narrator)

My mother didn't want to wreck her perfect body with childbirth, but my father needed someone he could play chess with at home, any time of day or night. I don’t know how they settled the matter.

— Playground by Richard Powers

Of all the men I ever knew, you’s the man who ought to be hoping the Bible’s all a lie—’cause if that trumpet ever sounds, you going to spend eternity talking.’

— Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

The Word tell us,’ he said, ‘to let the dead bury the dead. Why you want to go rummaging around back there, digging up things what’s all forgotten now? The Lord, He knows my life—He done forgive me a long time ago.’ ‘Look like,’ she said, ‘you think the Lord’s a man like you; you think you can fool Him like you fool men, and you think He forgets, like men. But God don’t forget nothing, Gabriel—if your name’s down there in the Book, like you say, it’s got all what you done right down there with it. And you going to answer for it, too.’

— Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

For she never grasped—not at any rate with her mind—what, with such incandescence, he tried to tell her on these Saturday afternoons. She could not find, between herself and the African statuette, or totem pole, on which he gazed with such melancholy wonder, any point of contact. She was only glad that she did not look that way. She preferred to look, in the other museum, at the paintings; but still she did not understand anything he said about them. She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they gave him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them. But she understood, at least, that they did give him a kind of bitter nourishment, and that the secrets they held for him were a matter of his life and death. It frightened her because she felt that he was reaching for the moon and that he would, therefore, be dashed down against the rocks; but she did not say any of this. She only listened, and in her heart she prayed for him.

— Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

There was not, after all, a great difference between the world of the North and that of the South which she had fled; there was only this difference: the North promised more. And this similarity: what it promised it did not give, and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other.

— Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

Richard had not been born in Maryland, but he was working there, the summer that she met him, as a grocery clerk. It was 1919, and she was one year younger than the century. He was twenty-two, which seemed a great age to her in those days. She noticed him at once because he was so sullen and only barely polite. He waited on folks, her aunt said, furiously, as though he hoped the food they bought would poison them.

— Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin