I repent nothing. A line she remembered from the fog of the internet. I am heartless, she thinks, but she knows even through her guilt that this isn't true. She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn't give it to them means that she's too soft for this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here.

Because survival is insufficient.

He does not trust memory. Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one's life.

The past is greedy, always swallowing you up, always taking. If you don't hold it back, if you don't dam it up, it will spread and take and drown. The past is not a receding horizon. Rather, it advances one moment at a time, marching steadily forward until it has claimed everything and we become again who we were.

He was unhappy, and for the first time in his life, that unhappiness did not seem entirely necessary. Sometimes he yearned to trust this impulse, to leap out of his life and into the vast, incalculable void of the world.

Grief can feel diffuse and dense all at once, like a flock of birds in the sky.

Livet går så fort. Det er så mange avgjørende spørsmål vi unngår å stille annet enn i vårt indre, så mye vi unngår å ta opp, selv om menneskene som kunne bidra til oppklaring og opplysning lever.

Nothing could be taken from me, I tought, if I had already given it away.

In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same.

They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.

To look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.

You spoke carefully, as if the story was a flame in your hands in the wind.

Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.

Violence was already mundane to me, was what I knew, ultimately, of love.

Why did I feel more myself while reaching for him, my hand midair, than I did having touched him?

I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe.

You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were a god, you'd know it's a flood.

Memory is a choice. You said that once, with your back to me, the way a god would say it.

Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war.

I didn't know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves.