"The triumph of my voice over profane targets made me painfully aware of my failures in the sacred sector. Paradox, I have said. The cleavage was lasting; I have never been able to heal it, and it is still with me today, though today I am at home neither in the sacred nor the profane but dwell on the fringes, in a mental hospital."

"I have always regarded card houses as the only dwellings worthy of humankind."

"Oskar was still unwilling to believe that love was love; love itself made him cast about for some other love, and yet time and time again he came back to tangled love, which he hated until the day when in love he practiced it; then he was obliged to defend it in his own eyes as the only possible love."

"The imitation of Christ has become an occupation with me, that I practice with the same distaste as all my other occupations."

"Against all my better judgment, despite my ingrained skepticism, I wanted happiness. I wanted to be boundlessly happy."

"Art is accusation, expression, passion...What he wanted was expression, always expression, pitch-black, desperate expression."

"Nothing is ended, everything returns, guilt, atonement, more guilt."

"I have inherited this combination of self-indulgence and frugality. I want everything but there's nothing I cannot do without."

"Oskar lost his innocence more than once and recovered it or waited for it to grow in again; for innocence is comparable to a luxuriant weed."

"Did he, I asked, believe in predestination? He did. Did he believe that all men were doomed to die? Yes, he felt certain that all men would ultimately have to die, but he was much less sure that all men had to be born; he was convinced that he himself had been born by mistake."

"Behind all the sorrows of this world, Klepp saw a ravenous hunger; all human suffering, he believed, coudl be cured by a portion of blood sausage."

"What did the onion juice do? It did what the world and all the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry."

"The thought of comfort's like a drug."

"In my case, it was just boredom, a state of mind I come by without effort, that impelled me to asssume a recumbent position several times a week in the aforesaid tree. Perhaps boredom is in itself the absolute evil...Are not loneliness and boredom twin sisters?"

"Adoration of a preserving jar: I adore. Who, I? Oskar or I? I, piously; Oskar, with distraction. Devotion, perpetual, never mind about repititions. I, discerning because without recollections; Oskar, discerning because full of recollections. I, cold, hot, lukewarm. Guilty under examination. Innocent without examination. Guilty because of, succumbed because of, remitted my guilt, unloaded the guilt on, fought through to, kept free of, laughed at and about, wept for, over, without, blasphemed in speech, blasphemed in silence. I speak not. I am not silent."

"I have had too many triumphs, too much success in my life. What I would like is to be unsuccessful for once. But thatis very difficult and calls for a great deal of work."

"But what, Oskar, are you going to fear?"