“Because menare killing the foreststhe fairy tales are running away.The spindle doesn't knowwhom to prick,the little girl's handsthat her father has chopped off,haven't a single tree to catch hold of,the third wish remains unspoken.King Thrushbeard no longer owns one thing.Children can no longer get lost.The number seven means no more than exactly seven.Because men have killed the forests,the fairy tales are trotting off to the citiesand end badly.”

“Klepp, however...must have given the cigarette girl a photo unbeknownst to me, because he became engaged to the snippety little thing and married her one day, because he wanted to have his picture back”

“He was taking advantage of the brief lull in the battle to take a little nap, for do not all men, even heroes, need a refreshing little nap now and then?”

“When the young womanleans over the sky,about to water the flowers as well as the weeds,her white front splits openuntil her milk runs.”

“I am not trying to say that a passport photo of himself can cure a gloomy man of a gloom for which there is no ground; for true gloom is by nature groundless; such gloom, ours at least, can be traced to no identifiable cause, and with its almost riotous gratuitousness this gloom of ours attained a pitch of intensity that would yield to nothing. If there was any way of making friends with our gloom, it was through the photos, because in these serial snapshots we found an image of ourselves which, though not exactly clear, was - and that was the essential - passive and neutralized. They gave us a kind of freedom in our dealings with ourselves; we could drink beer, torture our blood sausages, make merry and play. We bent and folded the pictures, and cut them up with little scissors we carried about with us for this precise purpose. We juxtaposed old and new pictures, made ourselves one-eyed or three-eyed, put noses on our ears, made our exposed right ears into organs of speech or silence, combined chins and foreheads. And it was not only each with his own likeness that we made these montages; Klepp borrowed features from me and I from him: thus we succeeded in making new, and we hoped, happier creatures.”

“We were convinced that she looked on with indifference if she noticed us at all. Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours. It isn't God in His heaven that sees all. A kitchen chair, a coathanger, a half-filled ash tray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can perfectly well serve as an unforgetting witness to every one of our acts.”

“Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.”