quotes by Per Petterson

"People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know _about_ you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook. No-one can touch you unless you yourself want them to."
— Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses: A Novel)

"...and we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt."
— Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses: A Novel)

"I remember a lot of dreams. Sometimes they are hard to distinguish from what has really happened. That is not so terrible. It is the same with books."
— Per Petterson (In the Wake: A Novel)

"A dead dog is more quiet than a house on the steppes, a chair in a empty room."
— Per Petterson (Jeg forbanner tidens elv)

"One of my many horrors is to become the man with the frayed jacket and unfastened flies standing at the Co-op counter with egg on his shirt and more too because the mirror in the hall has given up the ghost. A shipwrecked man without an anchor in the world except in his own liquid thoughts where time has lost its sequence."
— Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses: A Novel)

"Then she turns to me. 'Tell me. How are you really?' she says, as if there were two versions of my life, and now she is not on the verge of tears at all, but sharp-voiced as an interrogator."
— Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses: A Novel)

"It was as if gravity was suspended. It was like dancing, I thought, although I had never danced in my whole life. We were never to walk like that again."
— Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses: A Novel)

"It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you're reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again. A consolation, maybe, or a protest against a world gone off the rails, but it is not like that any more, my world is not like that, and I have never gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate. They whine, they wash their hands and crave pity. I believe we shape our lives ourselves, at any rate I have shaped mine, for what it's worth, and I take complete responsibility. But of all the places I might have moved to, I had to land up precisely here."
— Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses: A Novel)

"If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it...."
— Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses: A Novel)

"...everything felt fine at that moment; the suit was fine, and the twon was fine to walk in, along the cobblestone street, and we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt."
— Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses: A Novel)

"You decide for yourself when it hurts."
— Per Petterson

"Time is important to me now, I tell myself.Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but only be time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by. so that it grows distict to me and does not vanish when I am not looking."
— Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses: A Novel)

"She looks at me, this is not what she had expected, she sniffs at the food and only slowly starts to eat, swallows each mouthful with demonstrative gloom, and then turns to look at me again, a long look, with those eyes, sighs and goes on, as if she were emptying the poisoned chalice. Spoiled dog."
— Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses: A Novel)

"But I was not quite with him in my thoughts, and I wonder whether that is how we got to be after living alone for a long time, that in the middle of a train of thought we start talking outloud, that the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversations we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one form the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line. Is this how my future looks?"
— Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses: A Novel)

"Oh, well, we did have a good day out together, you and I, that doesn't happen every day, does it?"
— Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses: A Novel)

"...the young swans as big as their parents now, but still grey and it looks peculiar, like two different species swimming in a line, alike in all their movements, and no doubt they think they are the same, while everyone can see that they are not."
— Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses: A Novel)

"...and then I forced myself to sit still on my seat and finally I fell asleep with the rattling window banging against my head and the drone of the diesel engine singing in my ears."
— Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses: A Novel)