Peter Hoeg Famous Quotes
Reading Peter Hoeg quotes, download and share images of famous quotes by Peter Hoeg. Righ click to see or save pictures of Peter Hoeg quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.
With age I have voluntarily chosen certain limitations. I don't have the energy to start over again. To learn new skills or fight my own personality or figure out diesel engines.
The flakes are the size of tiny feathers, and that's the way snow is, it's not necessarily cold.
If you consider all the unpleasantness you encounter while you're alive, it seems improbable that it would all come to an end simply because you're dead.
Nothing corrupts like happiness. It makes us think that since we share this moment, we can also share the past.
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.
The cookies combine butter and spices in such a way that you could eat a hundred of them and only realize how sick you are after it's too late.
Where's tomorrow?'
That is what she has asked me.
When children cry, you talk to them about tomorrow. If they hurt themselves and are inconsolable, even though you pick them up, then you tell them where they are going tomorrow, who they are going to visit. You move their awareness on a day, away from their tears. You introduce time into their lives.
The woman has the knack of doing it gently, somehow. Without promising anything specific, without trying to deny the pain, tenderly she draw the child with her into the future. as if to say, we all have to learn about time. They even so it is possible to grow up without being damaged.
...
I knew what she meant. She had grasped the concept of changes in space, that places are different, also from each other. Now time had been introduced into her life, but she could not grasp it. So she tried to explain it in terms of space, which she had grasped.
To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost.
Because one who seeks the highest must not leave any path untried.
There are mornings when it feels as if you rise up to the surface through a mud bath. With your feet stuck in a block of cement. When you know that you've expired in the night and have nothing to be happy about except the fact that at least you've already died so they can't transplant your lifeless organs.
I'm not perfect. I think more highly of snow and ice than love. It's easier for me to be interested in mathematics than to have affection for my fellow human beings. But I am anchored to something in life that is constant. You can call it a sense of orientation; you can call it woman's intuition; you can call it whatever you like. I'm standing on a foundation and have no farther to fall. It could be that I haven't managed to organize my life very well. But I always have a grip - with at least one finger at a time - on Absolute Space. That's why there's a limit to how far the world can twist out of joint, and to how badly things can go before I find out. I now know, without a shadow of a doubt, that something is wrong. I
No person can open another person, All we can do is wait. And then work with the openness when it occur.s.
In ten years they would be dead, deported or in leadership positions.
I'm wearing a pair of high boots, a red turtleneck sweater, a sealskin coat from Groenlandia, and a skirt from Scottish Corner. I've learned that it's always easier to explain things if you're nicely dressed.
Deep within every blind, absolute love grows a hatred toward the beloved, who now holds the only existing key to happiness
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.
If you want to know who the real heroes of world history are, just look at the mothers.
Deep inside I know that trying to figure things out leads to blindness, that the desire to understand has a built-in brutality that erases what you seek to comprehend. Only experience is sensitive.
Even the raven started out in human form, and he fumbled blindly, and his actions were haphazard until it was revealed to him who he was and what his purpose was.
Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease.
The child had wanted attention. She had just asked to be noticed. But she was given an assessment. 'What a clever girl!
When we say 'time', I believe we mean at least two things. We mean changes. And we mean something unchangeable. We mean something that moves . but against an unmoving background. And vice versa.
Animals can sense changes. But consciousness of time involves the double sense of constancy and change. Which can only be attributed to those who give expression to it. And that can only be done through language, and only man has language.
The perception of time and language are inextricably bound up with one another.
She was transparent, like a watercolor. As if she were about to dissolve in sound, in tones not yet created.
Love has something to do with recognition, We can be fascinated by the unknown, we can be attracted by it, but love is something that grows, slowly, in an atmosphere of trust.
It's the kind of day that might make you wonder about the meaning of life, and discover that there is none.
No one who has lived side by side with animals that have plenty of room can ever visit the zoo.
He has a light, fumbling brutality, which several times makes me think that this time it'll cost me my sanity. In our dawning, mutual intimacy, I induce him to open the little slit in the head of his penis so I can put my clitoris inside and fuck him.
Danes express their strongest feelings in conjunction with food. That became clear to me the first time I was out visiting friends with Moritz. When I took a third helping of cookies, he looked straight at me.
"Keep on taking until you're ashamed of yourself," he said.
I wasn't confident about my Danish, but I understood what he meant. I helped myself three more times. Without taking my eyes off him. The room disappeared, the people we were visiting disappeared, I didn't taste the cookies. Only Moritz existed.
"I'm still not ashamed," I said.
I helped myself three more times. Then he grabbed the platter and put it out of my reach. I had won. The first of a long series of small, important victories over him and Danish manners.
When people are going to be taken from you anyway, then it would be better if you had never come to care for them.
We all live our lives blindly believing in the people who make the decisions. Believing in science. Because the world is inscrutable and all information is hazy. We accept the existence of a round globe, of an atom's nucleus that sticks together like drops, of a shrinking universe
and the necessity of interfering with genetic material. Not because we know these things are true, but because we believe the people who tell us so. we are all proselytes of science. And, in contrast to the followers of other religions, we can no longer bridge the gap between ourselves and the priests. Problems arise when we stumble on an outright lie. And it affects our own lives ... that of a child who for the first time catches his parents in a lie he had always suspected.
The greatest performances where when fingertips took away a very thin veil between people and uncovered the universe in its entirety.
SheAlmighty had tuned each person in a musical key, and Kasper could hear it. Best in the brief, unguarded moments when people were nearby but didn't yet know he was listening. So he waited by the window, as he was doing now.
There is a pleasant firmness of tone when one is in harmony with oneself. Even when it's a weak ethic one is resonating with.
A child who is born is something to seek out, something to search for, a star, a northern light, a column of energy in the universe. And a child who dies-that's an abomination.
I've always enjoyed cleaning. Even though they tried to teach us laziness in school.
Basker possesses three kinds of bite: a snap, a nip, and then something like a buzz saw and an angle grinder mounted on a bear trap.
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.
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.
I'm not crying about anything or anyone in particular. The life I live I created for myself, and I wouldn't want it any different. I cry because in the universe there is something as beautiful as Kremer playing the Brains violin concerto.
Back then I could not understand one word of what I read.
Reading did, however, give me heart. Even if you cannot understand what you are reading you can get something from books.
No matter how close people get, they never reach each other. Including us now. Even now, there's a place where each of us is alone.
You spend your whole life believing that you will always be on the outside or on the borderline. You struggle and struggle, and yet it all seems to be in vain. And then, suddenly, you are allowed inside and lifted up into the light.
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.
Fermat wrote in the margin: "I've discovered a truly wonderful proof for this argument. Unfortunately, this margin is too narrow to contain it." Two
Maybe a person can be born to the wrong people," he said. "Maybe a person should have been put somewhere else.
On closer examination, we are simply a banal tragedy spread over two generations.
Children woke up at six-thirty in the morning and shifted directly into fourth gear. Fourteen hours later they rushed straight into sleep at more than a hundred miles an hour without decelerating.
Confronted with people who have power, and who enjoy using it, I turn into a different person, a baser and meaner one.
Perhaps it's true that love is eternal. But it's appearance changes all the time.
But even they it was as though the time that the clock measured was not put to any use. For by far the majority of Europe's population, namely those living outside of the towns -- and, strictly speaking, also for those living in them -- the day began at dawn and ended with the onset of darkness, and work was regulated by the changing of the seasons.
What fascinated people about he measurement of time was not time itself, because that was dictated by other factors. What fascinated them was the clock.
So it is not fundamentally possible to be alone. Fundamentally, man has to be with other people. If man becomes totally, totally alone, then he is lost.
That was the way of the rule. They had so many to keep an eye on. As long as you kept a low profile, in time you would be forgotten. It was the best thing that could happen.
One adopted their language, that of the teachers and the schools, one had none of one's own. At first it was like a release, like a key, like a road. The only road in.
Much later one discovers that what one was let into, at that time, was a tunnel. From which one can never again escape. Not entirely. Not in this life.
If you have to wait for a long time, you have to seize hold of the waiting or it will become destructive. If you let things slide, your consciousness will waver, awakening fear and restlessness, then depression strikes, and you're pulled down.
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.
I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.
For my part, I never talk to the child about time. We talk about other things
though not about anything much
and never about tomorrow. For me that is impossible. Tomorrow we could all be wiped out. You think back upon all the promises you did not manage to keep. Talk about time and you will always end up making promises. Then it is better to say nothing at all, no matter what.
There can be great depths of love that are not reciprocated.
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.
Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition.
We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror.
Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions.
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.
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.
If you became blind," I said, "if you were used to finding your way around a house and then, suddenly, one day had an accident
was attacked or something
and became blind, only then would you actually notice the furniture. It would always have been there, but you would never have been aware of it, you would just have gone around it. Only when something becomes hard to cope with do you see it. That's how you become aware of time
when it becomes hard to cope with.
Some girls are fortunate enough to be in love with deep and intelligent boys," she says. "And then there's the rest of us, who have to make do.
There in bed, happiness comes over me. Not like something that belongs to me, but like a wheel of fire rolling through the room and the world. For a moment I think I'll manage to let it pass and be able to lie there, aware of what I have, and not wish for anything more. The next moment I want to hang on. I want it to continue. He has to lie beside me tomorrow, too. This is my chance. My only, my last chance. I swing my legs onto the floor. Now I'm panic-stricken. This is what I've been working to avoid for thirty-seven years. I've systematically practiced the only thing in the world that is worth learning. How to renounce. I've stopped hoping for anything. When experienced humility becomes an Olympic discipline, I'll be on the national team. I've never had any patience for other people's unhappy love affairs. I hate their weakness.
And yet, quite often, she comes to me. Seldom to have anything explained, but often to tell me something.
When she comes over to me, I sit down on the floor. It does not seem right to tower over her when she is talking to me. Instead I sit down, then our heads are on a level.