“As though all the world were a bad joke and she was the only one around who knew the punchline.”

“In the end, we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke. The soul is its punchline.”

“If our faith is strong, we’ll go to heaven, and we’ll understand the whole thing when we get there. As if life were a joke, and heaven the place where the cosmic punchline is finally explained to us.”

“Only the saints would joke so about the gods, because it was either joke or scream, and they alone knew it was all the same to the gods.”

“I am Hel,” she agreed. “Sometimes called Hela, though most mortals dare not speak my name at all. No jokes, Magnus Chase? Who the Hel are you? What the Hel do you want? You look Hela bad. I was expecting more bravado.”

“He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.”

“For a child who found herself transported overnight to other side of the world, where she knew no one other than her parents, books were my salvation.”

“All his leisure clothes were absurd — jokes, really — as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.”

“In my crazy world, above all others… you were the only one who was the ugliest. And you were the only one… who was the most beautiful…. This is the unspoken truth.”

“But for half a minute she wished it was a different sort of day, even though she knew that nothing good could come from wanting at the world.”