When I was with her, it was as though something was sucked out of me. The dark got brighter, the stunted straighter, and the strange thing was that it didn’t come from the outside, it wasn’t that she lit up the dark, no, it was something that happened in me, because I saw myself with her eyes and not just my own, and in her eyes there wasn’t anything wrong with me, on the contrary. That was how the balance changed. When I was with Gunvor, I no longer wanted to do harm to myself.
— Knausgaard. My Struggle Vol. 5 (my tr.)
Notes from a Room 