I don't understand you. I can't treat myself like a hurdy-gurdy from which I can take out an unpopular piece and put in a tune that everybody is whis… - Jens Peter Jacobsen

I don't know how it is, but I am so tired of commonplace happiness and commonplace goals.

What can it be, do you think? A hidden nerve that’s given way? Or something we have failed in or sinned against in ourselves, perhaps — who knows? A soul is such a fragile thing, and no one knows how far the soul extends in a human being. We ought to be good to ourselves —

...he looked so strange and absentminded; quite obviously he had just been reading a book, one could tell that from the expression in his eyes, from his hair, from the abstracted way in which he managed his hands.