"Celebrate your youth, my darlings. Blow out your candles and make sure that you wish for immortality"

"You were ruined by love when you were a very, very young girl"

We had a hundred ways to sign our contracts of love

"Look at you! This whole wonderful universe of things in one skinny girl"

Du trur du skal vere deg sjølv for alltid, men ein dag har du blitt ei gammal dame, og du kjennner namnet til alle i dødsannonsane i avisa.

Eg skjønnar at alle kveldane eg har vore heime og sagt til meg sjølv at eg sikkert ikkje går glipp av noko, har eg faktisk gått glipp av alt

- Visste du at det finst noko som heiter Parissyndromet? spør Anna. - Nei? - Det er ein diagnose ein gir japanske turistar som kjem til Paris og får alle draumar og illusjoner om verdas vakraste by fullstendig knust

Bygardane er det beste med Oslo, følelsen av å komme inn i ein ny trappeoppgang med ein pose øl, inn i ei leilegheit med store rom, høgt under taket, danse på slitne golv, røyke i vindauget på kjøkkenet. Gå frå rom til rom, danse på do, grine på kjøkkenet, finne nokon å kyss med i gangen

Eg veit ikkje kor langt unna ein kan vere kvarandre før ein sluttar å vere kvarandre sin næraste

...men kanskje mest av alt var eg einsam i 90-senga hans på Torshov i Oslo

"He's my whole world"
"Don't ever say that about anyone again. Not even me"

Old pictures look very rugged and young, and the people in the photographs always seem a lot happier than you are

There's nothing like the deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons

And nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with more nostalgia

....sometimes when he was a child and had felt like he was exploding, seperating from himself like a dying star

Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It's so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace

For the first time in his life, he understood, viscerally, what it meant when people said their hearts were in their throats, although it wasn't just his heart he could feel but all his organs thrusting upward, trying to exit him through his mouth, his innards scrambled with anxiety

Wasn't it a miracle to have survived the unsurvivable? Wasn't friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?

...In a constant state of yearning for their younger selves, back when life had actually seemed so full of promise and hope, back when they had been romantic, back when life itself had been romance

He feels the memory as something alive and wounding