Suffering justifies our hard and ungainly life. For us pain is art.

Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they write their life. Sometimes they also write up or rewrite.

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.

I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it.

I saw myself as unbreakable, as tender as stone. At first I merely belived this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn't affect me, that he didn't affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn't understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that it not affecting me, that was its effect.

Det er ikke riktig. At det skal være så lett for andre og så vanskelig for meg, jeg skjønner ikke hva det er, om det er en formel, en kode de andre kan, som de har kunnet siden de var små og som jeg ikke har fått med meg.

Tiden har gått forbi meg, helt stile, uten at jeg visste det, listet seg gjennom rommet mens jeg sov.

Å nøle er den mest menneskelige bevegelsen.

Det var så vanskelig å finne de riktige ordene. De riktige ordene fantes ikke. De stod ikke i manus.

Bedrøvelsen er den sinnsstemningen som oppstår når man har vridd raseriet ut av skuffelsen.

Livet er den tiden det tar å dø.

Så vaklevoren er den borgerlige familien at den går i oppløsning bare noen trekker fra gardinene.

Et hvert opprør handler om savn, om noe som mangler, og det er det tomrommet opprøret skal fylle.

Det er bare i fiksjonen man kan være sikker i sin sak, virkeligheten er langt mer lunefull.

Skjønner du at det vonde også kan være vakkert?

[...] det jeg kaller å være optimistisk i gjerningsøyeblikket.

Lykken har de lagt bak seg, den kommer kun som blaff, en forbigående tilstand.

Det er alltid noe å skjule. Det er skader fra privatlivets fred.

She had everything she wanted; all she had to do was convince herself that she wanted very little.

For the arrogance and the futility of remaining alive, the ridiculousness of it, the stench of it, the unreasonableness of it.