Childhood / Youth / Dependency Quotes
"Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own."
"I am barely six years old and soon I’ll be enrolled in school, because I can read and write."
"I was the one who bought it. Every Sunday morning at six o’clock my mother woke me up."
"It’s evening and I’m sitting as usual up on the cold windowsill in the bedroom."
"It’s fall and the storm rattles the butcher’s signs."
"Something terrible has happened in my family. Landmands Bank has gone under and my Granny has lost all of her money."
"I’ve started middle school and with that the world has begun to widen."
"Time passed and my childhood grew thin and flat, paperlike."
"My literary models at that time were hymns, ballads, and the poets of the 90s."
"One morning I woke up and felt really terrible."
"Sleep overpowered me again, and when I woke up, my mother was sitting on the edge of the bed."
"I was horrified. The hospital! My poems! Where should I hide them now?"
"I don’t want to follow tradition in that way. I don’t want to do it before I meet a man that I love."
"The future is a monstrous, powerful colossus that will soon fall on me and crush me."
"I’ll never learn to understand those kinds of jokes."
"Everything during this time makes a deep, indelible impression on me, and it’s as if I’ll remember even completely trivial remarks my whole life."
"My childhood’s last spring is cold and windy. It tastes of dust and smells of painful departures and change."
"The world doesn’t count me as anything and every time I get hold of a corner of it, it slips out of my hands again."
"As long as I live here I’m condemned to loneliness and anonymity."
"The world is constantly changing – it’s only my childhood’s world that endures."
"Once in a while my father says, ‘It’s strange that your hair is still black. Mine is completely gray now.’ He’s naive and believes everything we say, because he himself never lies."
"I think about that a lot and reach the conclusion that most women exert an irresistible attraction over men – but I don’t."
"It’s both sad and strange, but it does protect me from having children too soon, like most of the girls on my street."
"I write them down on brown wrapping paper and conclude sorrowfully that the poems are still not good enough."
"Then maybe my children will have them too; I think I’ll have the first one when I’m eighteen."
"I can’t explain to myself, either, why I want so badly to have my poems published, so other people who have a feeling for poetry can enjoy them."
"I feel like I ought to burst into tears, but instead I’m filled with a dark joy that I can’t define."
"I think I’ll have the first one when I’m eighteen."
"I feel sorry for him and kiss his leathery lips before I go."
"Maybe he feels the same, because he stays standing with his arm around my waist until the music starts again."
"I think about whether you can get engaged to a collection agent."
"But I’m so happy when I’m with Aksel because I’m really fond of him."
"He grabs my hand and shakes it heartily. ‘I respect that,’ he says warmly."
"‘I’m very romantic,’ confesses Miss Løngren as she pages through a magazine full of pictures of the world’s most celebrated couple."
"Death is not a gentle falling asleep as I once believed. It’s brutal, hideous, and foul smelling."
"Yes, I say uncomfortably, ‘but I want to live my own life, Father. I just want to be myself.’"
"‘Mother’s in a difficult age. Her nerves aren’t good. You ought to consider that.’"
"‘It’s as if nothing bad can happen when I’m with you. When I’m here, I don’t believe there’ll be a world war.’"
"‘No,’ I say, ‘but you’re not going to suddenly die and this building isn’t going to be torn down.’"
"‘You’re like a child,’ he says kindly, ‘a child who can’t really manage the adult world.’"
"‘You have beautiful hands,’ he says, ‘long and slender.’"
"‘It’s a sin and a shame that he has doomed me to childlessness.’"
"‘I want to use you to get my poems published.’"
"‘It’s stunning,’ he says. ‘There’s not a comma out of place. This will be a huge success.’"
"‘I almost can’t bear the sight of it. I realize I’ve never been in love, except for a brief episode two years before.’"
"My misery gets dramatically worse toward five o’clock in the afternoon."
"I talk incessantly while we eat, even though he only responds with one-syllable words."
"You have to let Møller go, he says matter-of-factly. It’s a crazy marriage."
"In the evening, when Piet and I lie talking in my narrow bed, I think how strange it is that he never says a single word about himself."
"I start to laugh. No, I say, that’s too childish."
"Tired German soldiers trudging in a strange city, not looking at one another."
"The days pass, the weeks pass, the months pass."
"But I don’t want to have this baby, I say emphatically. It was a mistake."
"I have a feeling that something special is going to happen before the night is over."
"I wake him and say that I’m going home. I’m irritated and sluggish, and I put on my clothes without a word."
"Good God, I say. He has an underbite and sixty-four teeth in his mouth instead of thirty-two."
"I’m pregnant, and I don’t want to have a child when I don’t know who the father is."
"He says there’s a lot of mental illness on his father’s side, and also that his mother isn’t too bright."
"I think I’m in love with you, he says, but it’s probably no use."
"Do you think he can give you an outlook on life?"
"Right, he said. You’re in love with someone else. This is something that happens to people, not even unusual in our circles."
"If she’s in pain, he said slowly, then it must be from rheumatism, and nothing can be done for that."
"The next morning I felt so miserable that I couldn’t even get up and make coffee for him."
"You will be too, he says, if you could just bear to be a little sick for a while, if you would just let me cut back a little bit."
"Everything I’m doing, I’m doing for you, for you to get better, so you can work again and be there for your children."
"One day he sits down next to me on the bed and asks if I’m feeling good."
"Try to stick it out, he said. They’ll get suspicious if I come too often."
"But there was also a faint glint of triumph in his eyes as he gave me a shot in one of the veins that was still open."
"You have to be admitted, he says, taking off his motorcycle jacket, for drug rehab."
"You have to speak louder, I said. I can’t hear you. You’re deaf in that ear, he said."
"I have to take action before the chloral stops working."
"I didn’t know a person could get so sick from being an addict."
"I love you, he said. I love your poems. For years I’ve wanted to meet you."
"But if I were born then, I would never have met you."
"That’s the terrible thing about love, I said, that you lose interest in other people."
"I was tempted to tell Victor too, but I resisted, for fear that I would lose him."