The Unit Quotes

“I was happy in the dream; but when I woke up it was with a feeling that I was falling apart, that I was cracking up from the inside and slowly falling to pieces. My heart was jumping and grating like a cold engine that doesn't want to start. My skin was crawling, and I couldn't manage a single clear thought. It was as if all my thoughts were crushed to bits just as they began to take shape. I didn't get much done that day.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit

“People who read books," he went on, "tend to be dispensable. Extremely.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit

“For anyone who has never experienced or set any store by being close to an animal, it is perhaps difficult to understand that you can miss a dog so that it literally hurts. But the relationship with an animal is so much more physical than a relationship with another person. You don’t get to know a dog by asking how he’s feeling or what he’s thinking, but by observing him and getting to know his body language. And all the important things you want to say to him you have to show through actions, attitude, gestures and sounds.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit

“You haven't forgotten what it feels like to lose a friend because of a child, I hope?" If course I hadn't forgotten that feeling of being abruptly pushed out of a close circle to some distant periphery. Coming second, third, fourth, last. Being treated like someone less knowledgeable, someone inferior.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit

“single people without children have a "childish sensitivity and are unwilling or unable to compromise or fit in”
― Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit

“I wanted to live a proper life with deep, interwoven relationships for better or worse, which only death could separate.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit

“That's all it was, the dream was just Jock and me and the stick and the beach and the sea and the sky and time passing by, and that was all, there was nothing else. And that was happiness.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit

“Life and existence have no value in themselves. We mean nothing; not even those who are needed mean anything. The only thing of real value is what we produce.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit

“I heard that before; I'd heard it until I was completely sick of it. People had often told me I was strong, and I regarded it as something dismissive rather than a compliment -- or whatever it was meant to be. Because I knew, and I know that there are no strong people. All people are weak. Some are certainly more independent than others, but that doesn't mean they're strong.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit

“Loving and leaving don’t go together. They are two irreconcilable concepts, and when they are forced together by outside circumstances they require an explanation.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit

“Not today, not tomorrow.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit

“But despite the fact that I'd let the house get so run down, and despite the fact that it was old-fashioned and impractical, and cold and drafty in the winter and damp and stuffy in the summer, at least it was my very own home, my sanctuary, a place over which I and no one else had control, where my dog could run free and I could work in peace most of the time: no noisy neighbors on the other side of the wall, no footsteps clattering up and down an echoing stairwell, no squabbling kids in the shared courtyard, no communal outdoor spaces were families with children or friends could come along and sit down just as I was relaxing in the sun, noisily snacking or partying around me as if I didn't exist.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit

“If he had driven to the south coast on a different afternoon, I thought. If he had driven there on one of those afternoons when I was there with Jock during the autumn and winter, instead of one of the days when I wasn’t there. And if we had walked toward each other and caught sight of each other, and I had thought, Oh look, there’s Johannes Alby, and he’d thought, Oh look, there’s Dorrit Weger with her little dog. And if we had stopped and chatted, and if I had invited him back to my house for a cup of coffee or a bowl of soup or some pasta. If it had started like that. If it had started then.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit