Peter Høeg Quotes

Do you know what the foundation of mathematics is?" I ask. "The foundation of
mathematics is numbers. If anyone asked me what makes me truly happy, I would
say: numbers. Snow and ice and numbers. And do you know why?"
He splits the claws with a nutcracker and pulls out the meat with curved tweezers.
"Because the number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers.
The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of a small child. But human
consciousness expands. The child discovers a sense of longing, and do you know
what the mathematical expression is for longing?"
He adds cream and several drops of orange juice to the soup.
"The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing
something. And human consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child
discovers the in between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the
stones, between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads
to? It leads to fractions. Whole numbers plus fractions produce rational numbers.
And human consciousness doesn't stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds
an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers."
He warms French bread in the oven and fills the pepper mill.
"It's a form of madness.' Because the irrational numbers are infinite. They can't be
written down. They force human consciousness out bey

If you remember," he said, "and have a past, then you can be given the blame and be punished. See – if you don't remember anything, you don't have time like other people. It's a bit like being crazy, so you get taken into protective custody. Then there's a chance.

When you assess something, you are forced to assume that a linear scale of values can be applied to it. Otherwise no assessment is possible. Every person who says of something that it is good or bad or a bit better than yesterday is declaring that a points system exists; that you can, in a reasonably clear and obvious fashion, set some sort of a number against an achievement.
But never at any time has a code of practice been laid down for the awarding of points. No offense intended to anyone. Never at any time in the history of the world has anyone - for anything ever so slightly more complicated than the straightforward play of a ball or a 400-meter race - been able to come up with a code of practice that could be learned and followed by several different people, in such a way that they would all arrive at the same mark. Never at any time have they been able to agree on a method for determining when one drawing, one meal, one sentence, one insult, the picking of one lock, one blow, one patriotic song, one Danish essay, one playground, one frog, or one interview is good or bad or better or worse than another.

I saw how pure, in a way, they were – no matter what they had done. Each in their own way they had tried to stay what they were. Not like me, who had never been anything, and so had been trying all my life to be someone else. To come inside. I saw that they understood this, too. That they understood it and that it was okay. That, even so, I mattered, come what may.

She said she had been thinking about the way you remembered your past. What you remembered, she said, was a string of events and years stretching back from the point where you now found yourself. In other words, a line of time. This might be coloured differently, depending upon what had happened to you. For example, if you had lost someone then it would be black. Other spots might be lighter. On some sections of the line time would have passed quickly, on other sections more slowly. But, for a long way back, it would still be a line. Though not all the way back – at any rate, not in her case – and what about me? She asked me to think about it. For her, she said, and maybe for everyone, if you went far enough back the line disintegrated. If you went all the way back to your early childhood it was no longer a line. Then there was a sort of landscape of events. You could not remember their sequence, maybe they had none, they just lay scattered about, as if on a plain. She believed that this plain belonged to the days before time had entered your world.

Time refuses to be simplified and reduced. You cannot say that it is found only in the mind or only in the universe, that it runs only in one direction, or in every one imaginable. That it exists only in biological substructure, or is only a social convention. That it is only individual or only collective, only cyclic, only linear, relative, absolute, determined, universal or only local, only indeterminate, illusory, totally true, immeasurable, measurable, explicable, or unapproachable. It is all of these things.