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, wa… - Karl Ove Knausgård

I walked around Stockholm’s streets, modern and feminized, with a furious nineteenth-century man inside me.

Day in, day out! Wind and rain, sleet and snow, sun and storm, we did the same. We heard something on the grapevine, went there, came back, sat in his bedroom, heard something else, went by bus, bike, on foot, sat in someone’s bedroom. In the summer we went swimming. That was it. What was it all about? We were friends, there was no more than that. And the waiting, that was life.

As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it.