It was an incredibly long time since anyone had been filled with wonder in Kadis. When the absurd became the normal they’d had to get used to being ashamed of feeling a sense of wonder. All their misery was no less wondrously natural and self-evident. God knows what might have happened long ago if they had had a sense of wonder. Those who don’t have a feeling of wonder live for the most part in serenity and feel secure in their state of trance. The act of waking up, any kind of wakening, consists of feeling of wonder and nothing else. Babies feel a sense of wonder when they are born and see their first daylight; and those who have lain paralyzed like a bird feigning death and are then cured feel a sense of wonder; and those who arise the dead feel a sense of wonder[…]

It can also happen that one single occasion of wonder can be a feeling so intense that it lasts a person for the rest of his life. he never again wants to raise his eyes even fleetingly. That was the case with Ädla, who on one occasion had been so filled with wonder that she thought she was going to die.

~ Torgny Lindgren, Light