“England once there lived a bigAnd wonderfully clever pig.To everybody it was plainThat Piggy had a massive brain.He worked out sums inside his head,There was no book he hadn't read.He knew what made an airplane fly,He knew how engines worked and why.He knew all this, but in the endOne question drove him round the bend:He simply couldn't puzzle outWhat LIFE was really all about.What was the reason for his birth?Why was he placed upon this earth?His giant brain went round and round.Alas, no answer could be found.Till suddenly one wondrous night.All in a flash he saw the light.He jumped up like a ballet dancerAnd yelled, "By gum, I've got the answer!""They want my bacon slice by slice"To sell at a tremendous price!"They want my tender juicy chops"To put in all the butcher's shops!"They want my pork to make a roast"And that's the part'll cost the most!"They want my sausages in strings!"They even want my chitterlings!"The butcher's shop! The carving knife!"That is the reason for my life!"Such thoughts as these are not designedTo give a pig great piece of mind.Next morning, in comes Farmer Bland,A pail of pigswill in his hand,And piggy with a mighty roar,Bashes the farmer to the floor…Now comes the rather grizzly bitSo let's not make too much of it,Except that you must understandThat Piggy did eat Farmer Bland,He ate him up from head to toe,Chewing the pieces nice and slow.It took an hour to reach the feet,Because there was so much to eat,And when he finished, Pig, of course,Felt absolutely no remorse.Slowly he scratched his brainy headAnd with a little smile he said,"I had a fairly powerful hunch"That he might have me for his lunch."And so, because I feared the worst,"I thought I'd better eat him first.”

“His training had a fatal flaw: he cared. He asked me what I wanted to eat for dinner. He knew I liked green, and if he had a choice between a blue sweater and a green one, he’d buy the green one for me even if it cost more. I like swimming, and when we traveled, he made it a point to lay our route so it would go past a lake or a river. He let me speak my mind. My opinion mattered. I was a person to him and I was important. I saw him treat others as if they were important. For all of his supposed indifference, there is a town in Oklahoma that worships him and a little village in Guatemala that put a wooden statue of him at the gates to protect them from evil spirits. He helped people, when he thought it was right.”

“I wondered what my father had looked like that day, how he had felt, marrying the lively and beautiful girl who was my mother. I wondered what his life was like now. Did he ever think of us? I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't; I didn't know him well enough. Instead, I wondered about him occasionally, with a confused kind of longing. There was a place inside me carved out for him; I didn't want it to be there, but it was. Once, at the hardware store, Brooks had shown me how to use a drill. I'd made a tiny hole that went deep. The place for my father was like that.”

“Who can explain why a few words in a particular tone can clear acres of sudden unfamiliarity? ...Would that person look up and grin, and find him grinning back, full of the sweet miraculous relief of having been perfectly received? ...He was saying, if it's not carrots, it's something else; he was saying, How futile life is, the slicing of carrots, the eating of meals; he was saying, How wonderful life is, to come home to the security of carrots in the kitchen; he was saying, Another day come to its devastating close. He was saying all this and I heard him because he was like me, entirely ambivalent about life. It was almost a question: Should I be full of joy or despair, Rosie? Joy, my face always replied to him, not because I felt sure that was the answer, but because I'd begun to want to make it his.”

“The fingers of his free hand work their way into my hair and tilt my head to the side as he deepens the kiss. He gets more aggressive, like he wants to gobble me up. And I want him to. God, I want him to.”

“We ran back, he first and I following him, between the beds and downstairs, and we picked up an armful of wood from the pile by the wall and the knife for whittling and ran up again, we couldn’t be quick enough. He knelt down in front of the stove, and it wasn’t long before he had done the trick again. Outside the window it was night now, and the wind blew vaporous white milk against the panes, milk over the forest and the fjord, but in here there were just the two of us and the stoves and the sound of wood burning behind the black iron and sending waves of heat out into the rooms and into the walls and timbers that sucked it in. I smelt the scent of wood growing warm, and it made me as white in my head as the whirling night outside, and hungry. We stood in the kitchen with our coats on eating the contents of two tins with one spoon we took it in turns to use, and we laughed, I didn’t even notice what I was eating. Soon it was warm enough for us to take off some clothes, his overcoat and my coat, and while he hung his on a hook, I let mine fall to the floor. I took off the sweater I wore underneath and dropped that on the floor too, I unbuttoned my blouse and still felt the cold against my neck. But the heat rose to the ceiling and up to the first floor and there was another stove there. Then I calmly walked across the room and upstairs with his eyes on my back, and at first he stood still, and then he followed, and when he got to the top my blouse was off and my stockings on the floor. I slowly turned round and stood there, me inside my skin, while he was fully clothed, and I cleared my head of every thought I had ever had and let them sink out into my skin till it was painfully taut and shinning all over my body, and he saw it and did not know what it was he saw. I put my arms round my back and unfastened my bra and slid the straps over my shoulders, and I thought he might be going to weep, but his voice sounded hoarse as he whispered:“You’re lovely,” and I answered “Yes”, and didn’t know if that was true. But it did not matter, for I knew what I wanted and what to say, and his hands were as I’d thought they would be, his skins as soft and his body as hard, and it was so warm around us, and the whole time I smelt the dampness of the bedclothes like the ones at Vrangbæk, and then I just shut my eyes and floated away.”