We spent the whole time, it seemed, setting everything up and then tearing it all down.

Hindsight gives a shape to what is shapeless as you live it.

The world loves poets and actors and some novelists who die young and never become jowly, dumpy, and arthritic, and they love them even more when they are tormented, hallucinating, and suicidal because the calm, reasonable artist, of which there are many, doesn't deliver the same frisson. And so we gild the young corpses, hold them up to the light, and watch them glow.

Human beings are desperate to be seen and to see themselves reflected in the eyes of others, to feel the family comforts of "us", the charming caresses of the tribe

Sometimes memory is a knife.

The more I focus on remembering, the more details I am likely to provide, but those particulars may well be invented [...] If you are one of those readers who relishes memoirs filled with impossibly specific memories I have this to say: those authors who claim perfect recall of their hash browns decades later are not to be trusted.

Alt dette skjedde i tidenes morgen, i den tiden da du besto av våt leire som senere stivnet og ble til et tredimensjonalt kart med en viss topografi, med visse mønstre og veinett - som du må bruke hakke og spett for å få endret på.

Jeg vil at de skal strekke seg etter meg så jeg kan vri meg unna.

Jeg hermer etter de andre, i et håp om at hvis jeg gjør bevegelsene, så følger kanskje resten etter. Det har ikke hendt hittil. Jeg fortsetter å bestå av løse deler som svirrer rundt.

Inni meg er det som om det finnes en slags motkrefter som setter i gang hvis jeg gjør det minste forsøk på å være et menneske det går an å plassere et sted, et menneske med en fast kjerne.

Jeg er et puslespill som faller fra hverandre hver natt og må pusles sammen igjen hver morgen

I yearned for that brief, sharp feeling I get when I drink - a sad, burning feeling - and then, blissfully, no feelings at all.

When the silence and the aloneness press down on me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery - air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, 'This is what it is to be happy.'

When you grow up -and from the look of things, you have awhile - you learn things never go back to normal simply because everyone's sorry. Sorry is ridiculous.

One or two individuals in times of crisis turn into Heroes, a handful into Villains, the rest into Fools.

Love conquers all. For centuries upon centuries we have been misinterpreting this famed trio of words. The uninformed masses breathlessly hold up this dwarfish phrase as a justification for snogging in public squares, abandoning wives, cuckolding husbands, for the escalating divorce rate, for swards of bastard children begging for handouts in the Whitechapel and Aldgate tube stations - when in fact, there is nothing remotely encouraging or cheerful about this often quoted phrase.

The Latin poet wrote ‘Amor vincit omnia’ or ‘Love conquers all’. He did not write, ‘Love frees all’ or ‘liberates’ all, and therein lies the first degree of our flagrant misunderstanding. Conquer: to defeat, subjugate, massacre, cream, make mincemeat out of. Surely this cannot be a positive thing. And then he wrote, ‘conquers all’ - not exclusively the unpleasant things, destitution, assassination, burglary, but all, including pleasure, peace, common sense, liberty and self-determination. And thus we may appreciate that Virgil’s words are not encouragement, but rather a caveat, a cue to evade, shirk, elude the feeling at all costs, else we risk the massacre of the things we hold most dear, including ones sense of self.

Isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.