"Kanskje man bare kan glemme alt sammen, hele forbannede livet, etterlate det i en slags grøft og gå videre som om ingenting har skjedd"

"Rart med det. Hvordan barndommer alltid er helt vanlige til man blir voksen og begynner å snakke med andre folk om barndommer. Først da oppdager man ting."

"Sånn er det med overraskelser. De spretter opp av esker ingen er lært opp til å se."

"She wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found."

"I did many things in my life without conviction; I always felt slightly detached from my own actions"

"Not too long before - ten days, a month, who can say, we knew nothing about time, in those days [...] Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now"

"Loneliness and melancholy swirled inside me"

"A sickening sense of emptiness, like there was a cold pit inside me and I was at the bottom, looking up towards a distant skylight, shivering"

"Soon we would have nothing in common, nothing but a past"

"Something was coming to an end; something was breaking that could never be fixed again."

"I was having the recurrent insight that the adults around me were really still children, in grown-up bodies. They were not, as I had assumed, in possession of the answers about life, some kind of grand truth that everyone was gifted with on reaching a certain age: They were about as lost as I was, maybe more so."

"The feeeling of being there together was so good it was almost panful - I wanted things to stay exactly that way, that one moment forever, but everything was always slipping away, nothing was fixed."

"No matter how intense, unique, beautiful or interesting your experience, it will be wiped away so fully that there will be no evidence it ever existed at all"

"I looked around and felt like crying, not from being sad but because everything went by so quickly and I wanted it back"

"I was thinking how life went on and on and for weeks and months on end nothing ever seemed to change, and then suddenly people would amaze you"

"No more waiting. You go out and live life, eh? Remember: You live life or it lives you"

"I was afraid if I touched her something might break"

"All this drama, all this waiting and hoping and crying over things we'd been told, raised on, warned about, these monumental milestones that ended up lasting only minutes in our lives and were never, ever as wonderful or horrible as you thought they would be."

"Even when there was love involved, something always seemed to hurt"

"She would look like the best of us and grow up laughing. Her laugh would sound like silver bells when we lifted her in and out of the shallow waves at the shoreline."