Carsten Jensen Quotes

Take the sailor," he said. "he signs on to a new ship. He's surrounded by nothing but strangers. Not only do they come from other towns and parts of his own country, but often from completely different nations. He has to learn to work with them. His vocabulary's broadened, he learns new words and grammar, and he comes across new ways of thinking. he turns into a different man, unlike the one who spends his life plowing the same old furrow. These are the men the world needs, not nationalists and warmongers.

Is there anything more heartbreaking than drowning in sight of land? Is there a single one of us who hasn't at least once felt haunted by the fear of slipping away within sight of a safe haven?

Their eyes persecuted him everywhere, eventually following him all the way into the darkness around his bed and into his dreams, like a madness that threatened to overpower him.

To Ejinar that cannonball was a monster with a will of its own. It showed him what war was: not a battery that exploded and sent matchstick soldiers fleeing, but a dragon that breathed hot fire on his naked heart.

That's how it is, he told himself. If you dread something enough, even your worst fears coming true brings comfort.

From now on, consider yourself a con artist.

With no other choices open to us, we'd turned our gaze seaward. The oceans were our America: they reached farther than any prairie, untamed as on the first day of creation. Nobody owned them.

Without discussing it with his mother, Anton went up to his teacher, Miss Katballe, and informed her that after seven years he was now quitting school. It was the best day of her life, she replied. With unexpected politeness he bowed, thanked her, and said, likewise.

We were familiar with the line that separates grief from madness, and we know that sometimes the only way to stay on the right side of it is to scream.

He wasn't physically impotent. So the impotence must lie in his soul. Finding oblivion in a moment's ecstasy was all he could manage.

There comes a time in the life of a sailor when he no longer belongs ashore. It's then that he surrenders to the Pacific, where no land blocks the eye, where sky and ocean mirror each other until above and below have lost their meaning, and the Milky Way looks like the spume of a breaking wave and the globe itself rolls like a boat in the midst of the sinking and heaving surf of that starry sky, and even the sun is nothing but a tiny glowing dot of phosphorescence on the sea of the night.

Life was like one big marching army. Death ran alongside and picked off a soldier here and there, but that didn't affect the army. Its march continued, and its size didn't seem to diminish. On the contrary, it grew on into eternity, so that no one was alone in death. Someone else would always follow. That was what counted. Such was the chain of life: unbreakable. But

Perhaps the greatest thing you can achieve is to love without demanding anything in return.

Having a child isn't a deal you strike with life. As I said: a child is a gift. And what remains after a child is gone is the memory of the years it was allowed to live. Not its death

Her grief was a burden so heavy, he came close to collapsing under it, and yet he couldn't lay it down.

No, he hadn't known anything about children, but now he'd learned something: a child's mind is open to everything.

At times he agreed with Anton: they were united by their silence. If they began articulating their thoughts, they'd feed one another's insanity and everything would fall apart.

Look at the swell. You'll not find a bigger swell anywhere. It has half the globe for its run-up. You're young. You have the whole world. Don't bother yourself with the past.

Life had taught him about something far more complicated than justice. Its name was balance.

The constant bombardment and the randomness with which death scythed us down had exhausted us...

She still held back her tears, as if subjecting herself to some terrible endurance test.

Freedom had a thousand faces. But so did crime. The thought of what a man might do made me dizzy.

Loss was a night that never ended.

Now I remembered a captain's honor and his only duty: to bring his crew back alive.

The miller's hefty wife, Madam Weber, already armed with a pitchfork, insisted on joining the fight, and because she appeared more intimidating than most of us men, we instantly welcomed her to our bloodthirsty ranks.

But I could feel resentment inside me, and I knew it would keep growing until it changed into something far more dangerous.

Even terror needs a yardstick, and surely the yardstick for the unknown is the known?

Many years ago there lived a man called Laurids Madsen who went up to heaven and came down again thanks to his boots.

We don't sail because the sea is there. We sail because there's a harbour. We don't start by heading for distant shores. We seek protection first.

Human beings are afflicted by a need to judge.

We thought we knew everything about him. But that's not how life is. When all's said and done, we can never truly know one another.

Your roots aren't to be found in your childhood so much as in your child. It's he who provides your link to the world, and home is wherever he is.

But that's how it is on a sailing ship, and in this respect its journey parallels that of life: simply knowing where you want to go isn't enough, because life is a windblown voyage, consisting mainly of the detours imposed by alternating calm and storm.

That's how we're connected: through the hurt we inflict on one another.

As long as our voiced were in harmony, it didn't matter that our accents were at war.

When it came to choosing between education and religion, Albert said, he'd choose education every time. The school represented young people and the future - and the church didn't. If the school in Vestergade was bigger than the church, so much the better. Any town that believed in the future should take note.

Hope can be like a plant that sprouts and grows and keeps people alive. But it can also be a wound that refuses to heal.

But he didnt want to be thought of as a fool. To walk around the town fully dressed and yet appear naked to the world was a shame he couldn't bear.

He felt Miss Kristina's presence like something poisonous and something infinitely sweet mixing together in his blood. Inside him, a lack of willpower and a colossal tension battled it out. He felt both weak and furious at the same time. He went around with his fists clenched, ready to fight, yet what he wanted most of all was to hold and be held.

That's the strange thing about a good story. No pleasure if you can't share it.

And what he contemplated was death. Some people complained when death came top early and claimed a child, a young mother, or a sailor with a family to provide for. He'd never understood that. Of course, it was a tragedy for those left behind and for the person who'd been robbed of the greater part of life. But it wasn't unfair. Death was beyond such notions. It seemed to him that the bereaved often forgot their grief at a death in favor of railing fruitlessly against life's injustices. After all, no one would dream of saying that the wind was unfair to the trees and the flowers. True, you might feel uneasy when the sun switched off its light, or ice gave your ship a dangerous list. But indignant, outraged, or angry, no. It was pointless. Nature was neither fair nor unfair. Those terms belonged to the world of men.