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 ordeal 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.

She had been contained before, contained and directed, by the trappings of life. Now she no longer feels contained or directed by these forces, no longer directed by anything at all. Life has slipped free of its netting.

You can drive yourself crazy thinking about different things you could have done inn the past.

Sjøl om jeg kan ta med meg noe av innboet, noen av bildene, noen av tingene til en ny bolig, så kan jeg aldri få igjen et sted der mannen min har levd og barnebarna har lekt. Det er kanskje ensomt å bo i et stort hus alene. Men det er også ensomt å flytte til et hus uten minner.

Å skrive bok er selsomt og pinefullt og minner mest av alt om å være forelska i et menneske som du ikke vet om gjengjelder følelsene dine, eller en runde med alvorlig sjukdom, som Orwell en gang sa. Fram til boka foreligger i bokhandlene, lever forfatteren i tvilens rike. Vil dette duge?

Klærne hennes var neppe dyrere enn klærne til mora mi, men hun bar dem slik at en hele tida ble minnet om at slank rimer på rank.

Alt som lenge har vært kjent og kjært—det behøver ikke være annet enn lyden av en vindushaspe eller en spesiell dørklinke—opplever vi som stemmer vi kjenner igjen, stemmer som vekker sterke og varme følelser fordi de en gang har rørt ved det dypeste i oss.

I vår tid er debattene blitt så polariserte at det er nesten umulig å snakke om noe som helst. Jeg regner meg selv for en antirasist. Det har jeg vært bestandig. Men nå er det antirasistene som er opptatt av hva som er riktig hudfarge. Da må jeg bare si takk for meg. Jeg synes de gamle retningslinjene var greie: Målet var å komme bort fra et samfunn der hudfarge spilte en rolle. Nå som det er omvendt, i antirasismens navn, er dette bare helt kokkelimonke. Jeg er 67 år, jeg er syk, jeg er for gammel til dette, jeg orker ikke å delta i den offentlige debatten lenger, det skal jeg love deg. Det frister ikke i det hele tatt, for det er blitt en betennelse i hele debattmiljøet. Alt blir tatt i verste hensikt.

'You realise you're waiting for something,' Juliet said, 'that's never going to happen. Half the time you don't even know what it is. You're waiting for the next stage. Then in the end you realise that there isn't a next stage. This is all there is.'

[…] the paradox of writing romantic fiction consisted largely in transforming imaginary improbable events in a manner to make them realistic. That ruled out most of the far more improbable events of real life.

Husk at de varmeste stedene i helvete er reservert for dem som gjennom en stor moralsk krise bevarer sin nøytralitet.

Alon Pinkas, israelsk diplomat og skribent.