No one who is young is ever going to be old.

Og jeg som trodde vi var unntaket, at vi var det store unntaket, at du var min eneste ene, og jeg din eneste ene, og at katastrofen som rammer alle andre, den mest pinlige av alle katastrofer, den mest ydmykende og banale, den vi hever oss over og ler litt av når den rammer andre (løgnen, utroskapet, oppgjøret, forsoningen og den nye løgnen i evig gjentakelse) - ikke skulle ramme oss.

I suppose we are all the products of our parent's joy and suffering.

It's odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another.

Every story we tell about ourselves can only be told in the past tense. It winds backward from where we now stand, no longer the actors in the story but its spectators who have chosen to speak.

I knew what I was seeing: dry grief, grief grown old and familiar. It enters your bones and lives there, because it has no use for flesh, and after a while you feel that you're all bone, hard and dessicated, like a skeleton in a classroom.

People imagine that hope has degrees, but I think not. There is hope and there is no hope.

[...] a Scandinavian trait inherited from a long line of people who had believed in suffering alone.

Being alive is inexplicable, I thought. Consciousness itself is inexplicable. There is nothing ordinary in the world.

We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

My mother and I choked on his silence, but we never interrupted it by speaking.

I had the sense that she was always somewhere ahead of me, and that I was running after her. I would look down at the blond hairs on her slender arm and ask myself what it was about her I couldn't grasp

When he was alive, I had felt no need to think of him constantly. I knew that he was there. Forgetfulness was normal. After he died, I had turned my body into a memorial - an inert gravestone for him. To be awake meant that there were moments of amnesia, and those moments seemed to annihilate Mattew twice. When I forgot him, Matthew was nowhere - not in the world or in my mind.

But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

"Forgetting," I said, "is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We're all amnesiacs."

I wanted you to press hard on me with your thumb the way you pressed on the picture, and I thought that if you didn't, I would go crazy, but I didn't go crazy, and you never touched me then, not once. You didn't even shake my hand.

All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was always controlling who got a chance and who didn't.

Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.

I hated them. I hated their beauy, their untroublet youth, and as I watched them dance through the magic colored pools of light, holding each other, feeling so good, little unscathed children, temporarily in luck, I hated them because they had something I had not yet had, and I said to myself, I said to myself again, someday I will be as happy as any of you, you will see.

It cannot last, I say, this feeling cannot last, but it doesn't matter. It is here now.