At the time, there would only be incoherence. As though meaning had slunk out of things and left them fragmented. Disconnected. The glint of Ammu's needle. The colour of a ribbon. The weave of cross-stitch counterpane. A door slowly breaking. Isolated things that didn't mean anything. As though the intelligence that decodes life's hidden patterns - that connects reflections to images, glints to light, weaves to fabrics, needles to thread, walls to rooms, love to fear to anger to remorse - was suddenly lost.

Rahel watched Estha with the curiosity of a mother watching her wet child. A sister a brother. A woman a man. A twin a twin. She flew these several kites at once. He was a naked stranger met in a chance encounter. He was the one that she had know before Life began. The one who had once led her (swimming) through their lovely mother's cunt. Both things unbearable in their polarity. In their irreconcilable far-apartness.

De kommer for å se igjen det de aldri har sluttet å se. De nærmer seg barndommen. Ingenting blir til. Eller går framover.

Jeg ville ikke være kravløs, jeg ville være krevende, jeg ville være i stand til å få kravene oppfylt, før de forsvant, jeg vil ha kravene og behovene mine tilbake.

Kjærligheten krever at vi er i ro, at vi slår oss til ro, at vi holder oss i ro på det samme stedet; bevegelse er ensomhet.

For no one attracted her more; his hands were beautiful, and his feet, and his voice, and his words, and his haste, and his temper, and his oddity, and his passion, and his saying straight out before every one, we perish, each alone, and his remoteness. (He had opened his book.) But what remained intolerable, she thought, sitting upright, and watching Macalister’s boy tug the hook out of the gills of another fish, was that crass blindness and tyranny of his which had poisoned her childhood and raised bitter storms, so that even now she woke in the night trembling with rage and remembered some command of his; some insolence: “Do this,” “Do that,” his dominance: his “Submit to me.”

What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one desire? Could the body achieve it, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay’s knee.

Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear and distant. Once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs. But sometimes, at rare moments, a memory of him will return to me with such suddenness and clarity that all the feeling I've pushed down for years springs out like a jack-in-the-box. At these moments, I wonder if this is the way it feels to be my mother.

The pain of forgetting: the spine. The pain of remembering: the spine. All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist; my knees, it takes half a tube of Ben-Gay and a big production just to bend them. To everything a season, to every time I’ve woken only to make the mistake of believing for a moment someone was sleeping beside me: a hemorrhoid. Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.

At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.