Tømme, tømme fornedrelsens beger til bunns! For nå er det sikkert at hun ikke kommer. Det får så være. Nå måtte han tømme alt det bitre, for på bunnen ligger vissheten, beruse seg med smerte, samle lag på lag av lidelse og skam inntil han vrir seg som en orm og blir nesten bedøvet av sine kvaler. Han hadde jaget etter lykken, nå måtte han hengi seg til smerten, fordi den er som narkose for de lidende. Det er natt, det er alt natt og hun kommer ikke.

Someone already fills your heart. And the gap between our stations is too great for any love to bridge.

What I sensed from here was not despair, but containment: a fierce resolve that we would not lose what we had now to what we could not have tomorrow.

The simple act of offering up her mouth to mine, was like the opening of a floodgate. What followed was a seamless continuation of her kiss. We did not pause to consider wisdom or morality, we did not hesitate at all. The permission we gave each other was absolute. We ventured together into that newness, and I cannot imagine a deeper joining than our shared amazement brought us. We both came whole that night, unfettered by expectations or memories of others. I had no more right to her than she had to me. But I gave and I took and I swear I shall never regret it.

Og det tyktes henne, hun stod i en hule av natt og det var dødens forborg.

Years were passing through the spaces between moments.

Dear Anna, We will live in a home with no walls, so that everywhere we go will be our home.

The spaces between our words grew.

Noe som minner om den tiende eller tyvende soldat i voldtektskøen, der han kaster pikens sorte sjal over det hvite ansiktet hennes for ikke å se de håpløse øynene mens han tar ut sine millitære gledesrasjoner i den triste, plyndrede landsbyen.

Vel. Hvis han var taus, kunne jeg også være taus. Jeg kunne så menn trenge litt hvile i den understrykte dødsredde gyngestolen, før jeg kjørte dit hvor udyrets hule var - og der trakk forhuden vekk fra pistolmunningen og nøt den utløste avtrekkers orgasme.

All looks with strangers became the unspoken question, "are you the stranger who will rescue me?" Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.

Maybe we were all promised heaven in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't help but suffer in comparison.

His silence having grown too pronounced to be ignored.

But I admired Carline Crale because she didn't fight, because she retreated into her world of half-lights and shadows. She was never defeated because she never gave battle.

My attention was caught at once by the girl's extraordinary Scandinavian fairness. She had the almost colourless ash hair -light grey eyes -and transparent glowing pallor that one finds amongst Norwegians and Swedes. She looked about twenty-seven and seemed to be as efficient as she was decorative.

We name children after the dead in the dim hope that they will resemble them, pretending to blunt the loss of the person we knew while struggling to make the person we don't know into less of a stranger.

She laughed, but did not promise. Instead she pressed her mouth to his, and he breathed her in, trust pouring back into his silent ribs, into the cage that held his heart

The room filled with black ink, deep and wondrous pools of dark liquid beauty that seeped into the spaces between her fingers and arms and lips. And the darkness between her tongue and the roof of her mouth was flooded with color and light.

His dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of a truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come that his parents had always talked about was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world to come -the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.

Tiny secret blueprints of their parents were floating within her, growing, invisible and silent, engineering a soul. Every pregnant woman was carrying the dead.