De fleste kids har en normal barndom, hvert fall når de går igjennom den, det er ikke før seinere de skjønner at noe kanskje ikke var helt som det skulle.

Ingen eksempler å følge, det var bare sånn det var, vi vokste uten noen å strekke oss etter, og da er det fort gjort å gro litt skjevt.

Kanskje begynner alle katastrofer med fødsel.

That's the past, isn't it. You think it's behind you, then one day you walk into a room and it's there waiting for you.

I suppose that’s what everybody wants, isn’t it. To be like everybody else. But nobody is like everybody else. That’s the one thing we have in common.

You couldn't protect the people you loved - that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering.

The past hung in the present like smoke in the air, like vapour trails, fading out slowly.

There is no past or future: when we think of the past, our memories occur in the present; when we imagine the future, we only do so from the standpoint of the present.

We are younger and thinner than I remember ever feeling. We look so clean. As if we mean no harm. As if we are not harm itself.

The things that make life comfortable are always unacceptable, if you look at them square on. Someone, somewhere, is always suffering so you can be happy. Which is why most people spend their time looking the other direction

The person who's gone has no reality anymore, except in thoughts. And once they're gone from thoughts, they actually are completely gone. If I don't think about him, literally, I'm ending his existence.

I too was twenty-five once, and even younger, though I readily concede that for you at this moment it must be hard to imagine. Life, which is now the most painful ordea conceivable, was happy then, the same life, A cruel kind of joke, you'll agree. Anyway, you're young, make the most of it. Enjoy every second. And on your twenty-fifth birthday, if you want my advice, jump off a fucking bridge. Thanks.

Holding hard, harder, clutching, not letting go. Well, if that's suffering, he thinks, let me suffer. Yes. To love whoever I have left. And if I ever lose someone, let me descend into a futile and prolonged rage, yes, despair, wanting to break things, furniture, appliances, wanting to get into fights, to scream, to walk in front of a bus, yes. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my lfe.

The image of that life: how beautiful, how painful, to belive it could after all be possible. For so long it has hurt to much even to think. And now everything hurts so much all the time that to think makes no difference, to think even lends a kind of sweetness to the terrible pain. The life they could have had together.

Attachment, the cause of all suffering, so the Buddhist say. To cling to what you have, what you have had, the life you have known, the handful of people and places you have ever really loved, to cling and not let go. Never relenting, never accepting, becoming all the time more enmeshed, holding harder, loving and hating more.

The realisation that his adulthood, into which he was entering now so definitively, and which would last all the rest of his life, would have to be lived without his father. That he was becoming a person his father would never know.

Crying she said to him: I want you to remember me. Too painful to contemplate. Staring into the sun somehow: agony intense enough to annihilate.

All the good in him, what little there is. Trying to be loved by her. His morality. Principle of his life.

Life is perfect and everlasting until the end of the song.

Thought rises calmly to the surface of his mind: I wish I was dead. Same as everyone sometimes surely. Idea occurs, that is. Remembering something embarrassing you did years ago and abruptly you think: that's it, I'm gonna kill myself. Exept in his case, the embarrassing thing is his life. Doesn't mean he wants to really. Or even if he does, not as if he would do it. Just to think, or not even think, but to overhear the words inside his own head. Strange relief like a catch released: I wish.