Let the Old Dreams Die: Stories

That's how things are these days: everything must move aside to make room for the new, all the time.

And that's the bottom layer in old boxes: melancholy, an indefinable sense of loss. You dig around and it comes swirling up to the top

The membranes that separate us from insanity, from the fall, the monsters, are so thin. Only paper walls.

Our fate is determined in rooms that must be easy to clean

Revenge,' he said, 'is a human invention. It serves no purpose.

a tiny, fragile butterfly the same colour as the eyes of the one you love, a colour for which there are no words.

How do we imagine a great love? Perhaps something along the lines of Gone with the Wind or Titanic is what comes to mind. But those aren’t really about love itself, but about a situation. Everything becomes more grand when it takes place in the context of a civil war, a shipwreck, or natural catastrophe. But that is like judging the painting by the frame. That the Mona Lisa should be judged a masterpiece largely because of the carvings that surround it. Love is love. In the dramatic stories, the people involved are physically willing to give up their lives for each other, but that is exactly what happens in the great but everyday love also. You give your lives to each other the whole way and every day, until death.

I have never met a couple with such integrity, such closeness as those two. They comprised their own little universe.

When there's nothing to see, when there are no thoughts, life comes instead.

Let the old dreams die. We have new ones.

There was something vaguely menacing about the way the two children were moving behind the smiling, unsuspecting family. Like predators

It is perverse that love should be subject to the same conditions as the mortal flesh. That it should wither away and die with it.

If life is a prison, then there is a moment in a person’s life when she realizes exactly where her walls are located, where the boundaries to her freedom lie. Whether there are walls, or possible escape routes.

Speaking of 2001, I celebrated the turn of the millennium with Stefan and Karin. The so-feared computer crash did not occur

our fate is determined in rooms that must be easy to clean.

I have heard it said about me that I am a man without ambition. In a way this is correct if by 'ambition' one means a desire to climb the career or status ladder or whatever it is called. But ambition can mean so many things. I, for example, have had the ambition to live a life of quiet dignity and I feel that in this I have succeeded. (short story, Let the Old Dreams Die)

This was the state he strove for: relatively happy. Happiness could easily tip over into its antithesis and sadness was hard to overcome. One could maintain a fairly continuous state of relative happiness if one took it easy.