“I suffered like this ever since I was born. I was ignored by everyone, forgotten, told I was not needed... I lived like the bugs underneath a rock... Know! Know my pain!”

“Like a lightning bug... Like a lightning bug?... Yes, just like a night lightning bug; because there are day lightning bugs too - even if nobody has ever seen one, I know there are some, and I know the day lightning bugs are the cockroaches that since they can't light up, people kill them.”

“If I imagine my soul, as I do when I pray, it's shaped like Stapafel. No change of place or religion can alter that. I lived beneath Stapafel from the hour I was born until I was sixteen. I've never seen it since, but that doesn't matter. My soul is in the likeness of a jagged peak with a rock like a man standing on its summit, and snags of rock shaped like trolls along its spine. Screes defend it, although it's not quite inaccessible if you know the way up.”

“Nobody told me love was warm. Such warmth - I seemed to remember it, it seemed like something forgotten by me since I was born. All the fires are here, and the warmth of my mother’s bed long ago and the deep heat of the sun.”

“My ignorance is essential. I do not write what I know but what I need to know.”

“In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don’t know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don’t know what is happening there.”