Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the … - Karl Ove Knausgård

For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.

But can’t I sleep here while you’re working?’
‘You know I won’t be able to. I can’t even write with a cat in the room.’
‘You’ve never tried with me in the room. I may have a good effect.’
Even though I was angry I couldn’t bring myself to say no. I had no right to be because what I was implying was that the miserable manuscript I was writing was more important than her. At that moment it was, but I couldn’t say that.
‘OK,’ I said.

I sipped the coffee and lit a cigarette. I can't say that I enjoyed the taste of coffee or the feeling of smoke descending into my lungs, I could barely distinguish the two, the point was to do it, it was a routine, and as with all routines, protocol was everything.

He was an old man, wore old man’s clothes, a flannel shirt and old man’s trousers, slippers and a hat, and had an old man’s gait, yet there was nothing old mannish about him, such as there was with my grandfather or my father’s uncle, Alf; on the contrary, when he suddenly opened up to us and wanted to show us things, it was in a kind of artless, childlike way, infinitely friendly, but also infinitely vulnerable, the way a boy without friends might behave when someone showed some interest in him, one might imagine, unthinkable in the case of my grandfather or Alf, it must have been at least sixty years since they had opened up to anyone like that, if indeed they ever had. But no, Hauge hadn’t really opened himself to us, it was more as if it had been his natural self which his rejection had been protecting when we arrived. I saw something I didn’t want to see because the person showing us was unaware of how it looked. He was more than eighty years old, but nothing in him had died or calcified, which actually makes life far too painful to live, that’s what I think now. At the time it just made me uneasy.