still

"One shouldn't be too sentimental about love... Most of what people call love... could just as well be with someone else. Love is a very practical arrangement, as I can hear, and that's fine in its way. But the greater that people fit together, and the greater the risks one is willing to take, the fewer options there are. I can't explain it, but it's the same with my profession; I couldn't have been something very different - there are few or no alternatives. That's how it was with Stina and me. It's like a performance that got interrupted while it was still at the beginning, and twenty-four thousand tickets have been sold in advance, and I have a responsibility to the spectators. The spectators are all those parts of me, and of her, that want to have each other; it's not just the inner prince and princess, but also the inner dwarfs, the cripples, the naughty inner children. They sit waiting because they know it has been decided that this performance should be completed. It was commissioned higher up. I feel that somewhere outside the usual pettiness, a contract has been written, and it needs to be fulfilled"

- Kasper Krone, world-renowned clown with exceptional powers of hearing, in The Quiet Girl by Peter Høeg