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“She had never done anything bad to me. She had been good for me, always wanting the best for me. She had no defects, flaws or shortcomings. She wanted only good and she did good. The defects, flaws and shortcomings were all mine. I tried as hard as I could to hide them from her, and I was usually successful, but it was always there, inside me, a shadow I cast, and it gave me a bad conscience. I wanted to be out of this, I wanted to be alone, then it would disappear as it wouldn't affect anyone else, I would be left with it. But to be alone I would have to leave her, finish what she had invested so much in and where, in a way, I too had invested so much. She often told me she loved me, and I didn't want to hurt her, not for anything in the world, I didn't want to turn away from her, from someone who loved me so much.”

“When I was with her it was as though something was being drawn out of me. The darkness became lighter, the crippled straighter, and the strange thing was that it didn't come from outside, it wasn't that she lit the darkness, no, it was something that happened inside me because I saw myself with her eyes, and not just my own, and in her eyes there was nothing wrong with me, quite the contrary. In this way the balance shifted. When I was with her I no longer wished to do myself any harm.”

“All day flashes of happiness swept through me. Something fantastic had happened. We had chatted a bit, that was all. For a year she had worked here, for a year I had seen her going to and fro, and she had seen me. I had never felt any of what I felt now. Not once, not even close. Then we had met at a party, smiled at each other - and that was that? Yes that was that. How was it possible? How could it change everything? Because everything was changed, I knew that. My heart told me. And the heart is never wrong. The heart is never ever wrong.”

“I saw her in front of me and a wave of happiness and sorrow rose within me. How was this going to turn out? How was it going to turn out? I hadn't eaten all day, and I couldn't get anything down at home either, I wasn't interested and food didn't seem necessary. I was burning up. For the 2 hours before I could leave I wandered around, lay down on my bed, stared at the ceiling, got up and paced to and fro. It was terrible, I was so high that all I could possible expect now was a fall.”

“It would be so much easier to give up, to say a cold goodbye and not contact her again. All the problems, all the pain, all the defeats would finish there. But I couldn't. She stood up, it was late, time to go home, I accompanied her to the door, said bye, watched her go, she walked up the hill without turning. When I went back down I put on 'Siamese Dream' again, lay back on the bed and let my mind fill with thoughts of her”

“We don't live our lives alone, but that doesn't mean we see those alongside whom we live our lives. When Dad moved to Northern Norway and was no longer physically in front of me with his body and his voice, his temper and his eyes, in a way he disappeared from my life, in the sense that he was reduced to a kind of discomfort I occasionally felt when he called or when something reminded me of him, then a kind of zone within me was activated, and in that zone lay all my feelings for him, but he was not there. Later, in his notebooks, I read about the Christmas when he called from the Canary Islands and the weeks that followed. Here he stands before me as he was, in midlife, and perhaps that is why reading them is so painful for me, he wasn't only much more than my feelings for him but infinitely more, a complete and living person in the midst of his life.”