I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven.

"Livet mitt er et puslespill. Jeg har en pose med brikker men jeg aner ikke hvordan jeg skal sette dem sammen, eller om det går i det hele tatt".

"Jeg setter sammen bitene, ulike fragmenter av historien svever ned fra stjernene, faller på plass mellom vinglassene, jeg skal ikke si at jeg ikke har tenkt på det før, jeg har ikke gjort annet, men av og til er det bedre å glemme ting man ikke forstår, enn å la det svømme rundt i kroppen som små dyr som har lyst til å spise deg".

Man får inte leva om sitt liv. Det är det som är själva grejen!

Och eftersom sorgen är ett tidvatten finns det stunder da sorgen kommer upp til ytan och sköljer över en med förvanansvärd styrka, trots att man tycker att så mycket tid förflutit, att åren har kommit och gått. Men eftersom sorgen är ett tidvatten är det också så att den i stunder drar sig undan, och man upptäcker att man faktisk befinner sig på torra land och kanskje borda passa på att sträcka på benen och ta sig en promenad. För livet fortsätter även om det är något helt annat än forut.

" Ibland handlar det inte om att leve. Det handlar om att överleva. Detta ögonblick og nästa. Att komma igjenom, att fortsätta andas, ett andetag i taget. Det blir inte bra, men det kan bli bättre"

(...) but then they danced down the street like dingledodies and I shambled after as usual as I've been doing all my life after people that interest me, because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing.. but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.

"Det gror ikke før det har blødd. Var det ikke det alle hadde sagt før jeg dro min vei? At jeg måtte finne meg selv? Jeg måtte finne meg selv, sa de. Men jeg ville ikke det. Den siste jeg ville finne var meg selv. Jeg ville finne en annen, som var lettere å ha med å gjøre enn meg, en jeg kunne komme overens med, som jeg kunne leve med uten å dø."

"There will come a time," I said, "when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this" - I gestured encompassingly - "will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."

My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations

What a slut time is. She screws everybody.

People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.

There comes a time when we realise that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow - that, in short, we are all going.

You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

"I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."

She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.

She died in my arms saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we could never have war anymore.

"I feel too much. That's what's going on." "Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel the wrong ways?" "My insides don't match up with my outsides. "Do anyone's inside and outsides match up?" "I don't know. I'm only me." "Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside." "But it's worse for me." "I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him." "Probably. But it really is worse for me."

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"