For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open.

She loved mysteries so much that she became one.

Maybe it’s more like you said before, all of us being cracked open, like, each of us starts out as a watertight vessel, and these things happen, these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places, and I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable, once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled, but there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart, and it’s only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks, and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face to face? Not until you saw into my cracks, and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade, but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.

What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.

Folk liker at du forteller dem ting, i passe mengder, i en beskjeden, fortrolig tone, og de trur at de kjenner deg, men de gjør ikke det, de kjenner til deg, for det de får greie på er fakta, ikke følelser, ikke hva du mener om noe som helst, ikke hvordan det som har skjedd deg og alt du har bestemt deg for, har gjort deg til den du er. Det de gjør, er å fylle ut med egne følelser og meninger og antakelser, og de komponerer et nytt liv som har fint lite med ditt å gjøre, og dermed går du trygg.

Before I know it, I'll be thirty and I'll realise that every day I look less like the person I wanted to be when I was fifteen.

When we feel like victims, all our actions and beliefs are legitimised, however questionable they may be. Our opponents, or simply our neighbours, stop sharing common ground with us and become our enemies. We stop being aggressors and become defenders. The envy, greed or resentment that motivates us becomes sanctified, because we tell ourselves we're acting in self-defence.

Human beings believe just as they breathe - in order to survive.

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad.

I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.

I’m done. I’m old, I’m sad - that’s on a good day. I want out of this mess. But I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.

How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?

When nobody will look at you, you can stare a hole in them. Picking out all the little details you'd never stare long enough to get if they'd even just return your gaze, this, this is your revenge.

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known.

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.