Jeg har lyst til å dø, sa jeg, fordi jeg har minner i kroppen og tanker som ikke er til å holde ut. Jeg veier femti kilo, dette får ikke plass i meg.

Jeg skulle vise dem at jeg var akkurat som de trodde, bare verre. At jeg kunne ødelegge meg bedre enn noen andre hadde gjort.

We must stop viewing the present as the continuation of our past and see it, instead as the beginning of our future.

As we speak, we omit [...] When a story is told, it is changed.

Our parents lives before we're born are merely phantoms.

I remember more than I care to

The truth is, everything I know about his life is altered with each explanation of it, gets magnified to such a scale that I glimpse meanings in the grain that are not there.

She told me that the brain is built to forget things as we continue to live, that memories are meant to fade and disintegrate, that skin, so protective in the beginning because it has to be to protect our organs, sags eventually - because the organs aren't so hot anymore either - and sharp edges become blunt, that the pain of letting go of grief is just as painful or even more painful than the grief itself.

At least we have rage and we will build empires with that, gentlemen.

Can't you just be like the rest of us, normal and sad and fucked up and alive and remorseful?

It feels like I don't have quite enough skin, that parts of me that should be covered are exposed.

There is no meaning to life but it's okay and now that I really know it and have had it confirmed and can stop searching for it I can go on living!

She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.

She learned that suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next

We spent the whole time, it seemed, setting everything up and then tearing it all down.

Hindsight gives a shape to what is shapeless as you live it.

The world loves poets and actors and some novelists who die young and never become jowly, dumpy, and arthritic, and they love them even more when they are tormented, hallucinating, and suicidal because the calm, reasonable artist, of which there are many, doesn't deliver the same frisson. And so we gild the young corpses, hold them up to the light, and watch them glow.

Human beings are desperate to be seen and to see themselves reflected in the eyes of others, to feel the family comforts of "us", the charming caresses of the tribe

Sometimes memory is a knife.

The more I focus on remembering, the more details I am likely to provide, but those particulars may well be invented [...] If you are one of those readers who relishes memoirs filled with impossibly specific memories I have this to say: those authors who claim perfect recall of their hash browns decades later are not to be trusted.