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- 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

I feel so many things and I need to feel nothing at all

Wherever she went, wherver I went, there it would be, that shining twined string that stretched and pulled but never broke, our every movement reminding us of what we would never have again

On the other side are waves, tumuly, rainstorms, excitement: everything he cannot control, everything potentially awful and ecstatic, everything he has lived his adult life trying to avoid, everything whose absence bleeds his life of color

He and his friends have no children, and in their absence, the world sprawls before them, almost stifling in its possibilities. Without them, one's status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself

He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest

The first group feels sorry for him because they assume his singlehood is not his decision, but a state imposed upon him; and the second group feels a kind of hostility for him, because they think that singlehood is his decision, a defiant violation of a fundamental law of adulthood