At the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dr… - Karl Ove Knausgård

The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning.

But what we were best at, what we were really the kings of, that was buses and sitting around in bedrooms. No one could beat us at that.

Why this should be so is hard to say; one might be tempted to believe that it was based on some ancient convention that originally had a practical purpose, such as a cellar being cold and therefore best suited for storing corpses, and that this principle had been retained in our era of refrigerators and cold-storage rooms, had it not been for the notion that transporting bodies upward in buildings seems contrary to the laws of nature, as though height and death are mutually incompatible.