For five years you tried to be young. When you left high school - just a few days after you started - you were hired at the village factory, but you didn't stay there long, either, barely a couple of weeks. You didn't want to repeat the life of your father and his father before him. They'd gone straight to work the moment childhood was over, at fourteen or fifteen. They had gone, without any transition, from childhood to exhaustion and getting ready to die, without ever having been granted those few years of oblivion toward the world and reality that others call youth [...]

[...] You lived as intensely and aggressively as possible, because you felt that these experiences were stolen - and this, this is my point: there are those to whom youth is given and those who can only try desperately to steal it. [...]