"But be warned, young Nona: a book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front. Treat books with respect."

The hardest lesson I ever learned was that every bad thing you see a friend do to someone else they will someday do to you.

Og så vidt jeg vet har det aldri vært kriminelt å være dum i Danmark. Da hadde det ikke vært mange på frifot av den regjeringen som sitter i dag.

Thank you means... Thank you means you did something good to me. Or something you thought was good. And that good thing was giving me fish. So that made me happy, but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That's what Thank you means.

Vi tror vi vil ha svar. Men det vi egentlig vil ha, er de riktige svarene. Slik er menneskenaturen. Vi stiller spørsmål vi håper skal gi oss de svarene vi ønsker. Problemet er at vi ikke kan velge sannheten. Sannhet har en tendens til bare å være sannhet. Det eneste reelle valget vi har, er om vi vil tro på den eller ei.

You can't find happiness looking for the meaning of life. Meaning is only the third most important thing. It comes after loving and being.

The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.

Some humans not only liked violence, but craved it, I realised. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted away from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.

Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead.

Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good.

I don't believe in soul mates anymore and I'm not looking for anything. But if I did believe in them, I'd believe your soul mate was somebody who had all the things you didn't, that needed all the things you had. Not somebody who's suffering from the same stuff you are.

No amount of advice or lectures or trying to chain somebody down ever stopped anyone who didn't want to stop in the first place.

Det finnes mennesker som aldri gråter. Det sies at de lider mer enn de andre.

Nasjonale reisninger er som steiner man løfter opp fra jorden - alskens kryp og utøy kommer krypende frem. For sin vulgaritet har de store ord som kan dekke dem.

As always, in matters of surpassing human interest, those who knew nothing whatever either at first or even second hand were the most emphatic in expressing their opinions; which are well known to have a way of turning into established facts overnight.

"You can't tell from looking at a man what he's capable of doing. And you certainly can't tell what he's done."

"Some folk are dealt a bad hand. But you can't rely on another person's conscience to live the life you want to live. You make do with what you're given; you struggle on."

For så er sagt at mennesket blir aldri tilfreds, gi det noe så ønsker det mer.

A coping strategy, Margaret Creasy had called it. The only problem was, when your whole existence is something you have to cope with, you look back one day and find that your strategy has become a way of life.

I still hadn’t learned the power of words. How, once they have left your mouth, they have a breath and a life of their own. I had yet to realize that you no longer own them. I hadn’t learned that, once you have let them go, the words can then, in fact, become the owner of you.