Peter Høeg Quotes

We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror.

Maybe it's wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.

Falling in love has been greatly overrated. Falling in love consists of 45 percent fear of not being accepted, 45 percent manic hope that this time the fear will be put to shame and a modest 10 percent frail awareness of the possibility of love. I don't fall in love any more. Just like I don't get the mumps.

She was transparent, like a watercolor. As if she were about to dissolve in sound, in tones not yet created.

When you let your mind go blank,' he said, 'or when you stop talking for a long time, something happens. Time becomes different. It goes away. It doesn't come back until you start to say something.

Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions.

Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease.

It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly.

We sat there and I knew that this was how it felt to be totally accepted. You sit close to another person and are understood, everything is understood and nothing is judged and you are indispensable.

I like him. I have a weakness for losers. Invalids, foreigners, the fat boy of the class, the ones nobody ever wants to dance with. My heart beats for them. Maybe because I've always known that in some way I will forever be one of them.

The fear for oneself, that one can do something about. Upon it one can turn the light of awareness. But when one is no longer worrying about oneself, then the fear comes for other people and, after that, for the world. There are no fearless people, only fearless moments.

When my mother didn't come back I realized that any moment could be the last. Nothing in life should simply be a passage from one place to another. Each walk should be taken as if it is the only thing you have left. You can demand something like this of yourself as an unattainable ideal. After that, you have to remind yourself about it every time you're sloppy about something. For me that means 250 times a day.

Under certain circumstances the fateful decisions in life, sometimes even in matters of life and death, are made with an almost indifferent ease. While the little things-for instance, the way people hang on to what is over-seem so important.

If you want to support others you have to stay upright yourself.

There's a widespread notion that children are open, that the truth about their inner selves just seeps out of them. That's all wrong. No one is more covert than a child, and no one has a greater need to be that way. It's a response to a world that's always using a can opener to open them up to see what's inside, wondering whether it ought to be replaced with a more useful sort of preserves.

There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language.

Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.

The great systems that inform the world about the truth and life invariably claim to be absolutely truthful and well-balanced. In reality they are quaking bridges built out of yearning.

Some thoughts have glue on them.----Smilla

The body's pain is so paper-thin and insignificant compared to that of the mind.

Confronted with people who have power, and who enjoy using it, I turn into a different person, a baser and meaner one.

I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.

The knives in my apartment are only sharp enough to open envelopes with. Cutting a slice of coarse bread is on the borderline of their ability. I don't need anything sharper. Otherwise, on bad days, it might easily occur to me that I could always go stand in the bathroom in front of the mirror and slit my throat. On such occasions it's nice to have the added security of needing to go downstairs and borrow a decent knife from a neighbor.

..That's where we humans make a mistake. We don't see the utterly amazing when it comes to us disguised as the ordinary.

There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it.

The problem with anger against God is that it's impossible to go higher in the system to complain.

Those who were on the inside, the majority that is, for them it had been hard to get his point, mostly they were just pleased that they were on the inside, that they were the fittest. For those on the outside, the fear and abandonment amounts to almost everything; everybody knows that. Understanding is something one does best when one is on the borderline.

I have sat in the dark and looked at them both, the child and the woman. And the feeling has become too much. It is not sorrow or joy; it is the weight and the pressure of having been brought into their lives, and of knowing that if one were ever to be separated from them, it would mean your obliteration.

He boils milk with fresh ginger, a quarter of a vanilla bean, and tea that is so dark and fine-leaved that it looks like black dust. He strains it and puts cane sugar in both our cups. There's something euphorically invigorating and yet filling about it. It tastes the way I imagine the Far East must taste.

Grief is a gift, something you have to earn.

I don't fall in love anymore. Just like I don't get the mumps.

To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost.

When you're young, you think that sex is the culmination of intimacy. Later you discover that it's barely the beginning.

Never do I close my door behind me without being conscious that I am carrying out an act of charity towards myself.

There's a look of mischief in his eyes. 'Smilla. Why is it that such an elegant and petite girl like you has such a rough voice.' I'm sorry,' I say, 'if I give you the impression that it is only my mouth that's rough. I do my best to be rough all over.