Tove Ditlevsen quotes:
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[On her mother:] My relationship with her is close, painful, and skaky, and I always have to keep searching for a sign of love. Everything I do, I do to please her, to make her smile, to ward off her fury. This work is extremely exhausting ...
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Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can't get out of it on your own.
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Memory, that library of the soul from which I will draw knowledge and experience for the rest of my life.
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my poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab that hasn't yet fallen off completely.
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Down in the bottom of my childhood my father stands laughing.
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my childhood grew thin and flat, paperlike. It was tired and threadbare, and in low moments it didn't look like it would last until I was grown up.
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I fear / the place I have / in the memory of others. / They remind me of things / I myself have forgot.