«The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.»
Quentin Jacobsen har brukt store deler av sitt liv på å elske den eventyrlige Margo Roth Spiegelman på avstand. Ein kveld klatrar ho inn vindauge hans for å dra han med ut på ein rekke eventyr. Dagen etter er ho borte, men ho har lagt att spor. Med dette byrjar Quentin sitt søk etter jenta han elskar. Ikkje berre fysisk, men han leitar og etter kven ho var. Kven var eigentleg jenta han har brukt så mange år på å elske?
«Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one»
«It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.»
Ein herleg bok om å skulle være den ein er eller tilpassa seg omstendigheten. Om korleis me har visse bileter av menneska rundt oss og om korleis ein trur ein kjenner nokon heilt til ein innser at ein ikkje kjente dei i det heile tatt. Ei bok om å lære å leve og å tørre å være.
«Maybe the string brak, or maybe our ship sink, or maybe we're grass – our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphores, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphore you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected that we can use these root systemt not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications.»
«It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in»
