<b>Over us human beings there hangs an awful sword of justice.</b> - Halldór Laxness

These problems never seemed to baffle my grandfather nor cause him any anxiety; difficulties which in most people's eyes would have led to endless complications were disposed of by my grandfather almost without thinking, with the easy assurance of a sleepwalker who strolls along a ledge halfway down a hundred-foot precipice—yes, I am tempted to say with the same disregard for the laws of nature as a ghost passing through locked doors.

It's strange that all birds don't fly in the same way . . . I've heard that the wings of aeroplanes all conform to the same formula, whereas birds each conform to a formula of their own . . . All birds are perhaps a little wrong, because an absolute once-and-for-all formula for a bird has never been found, just as all novels are bad because the correct formula for a novel has never been found.

One asks and asks and always the answers become more incomprehensible than the question. In the end one becomes an idiot.