Peter Høeg > Quotes

“To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“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.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“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.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“If you want to support others you have to stay upright yourself.”
― Peter Høeg

“We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“Once you have realised that there is no objective external world to be found; that what you know is only a filtered and processed version, then it is a short step to the thought that, in that case, other people too are nothing but a processed shadow, and but a short step more to the belief that every person must somehow be shut away, isolated behind their own unreliable sensory apparatus. And then the thought springs easily to mind that man is, fundamentally, alone. That the world is made up of disconnected consciousnesses, each isolated within the illusion created by its own senses, floating in a featureless vacuum.
He does not put it so bluntly, but the idea is not far away. That, fundamentally, man is alone.”
― Peter Høeg, Borderliners

“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.”
― Peter Høeg

“Some thoughts have glue on them.----Smilla”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“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.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“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.”
― Peter Høeg

“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.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

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

“Confronted with people who have power, and who enjoy using it, I turn into a different person, a baser and meaner one.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“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.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“She was transparent, like a watercolor. As if she were about to dissolve in sound, in tones not yet created.”
― Peter Høeg, The Quiet Girl

“It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly.”
― Peter Høeg, Tales of the Night

“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.”
― Peter Høeg

“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.”
― Peter Høeg, Borderliners

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

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

“She looked at him. As if she wanted to determine his molecular weight.”
― Peter Høeg, The Quiet Girl

“Дважды случалось, что я, уехав в Гренландию, по полгода не видела своего отражения в зеркале. По пути домой я старательно избегала зеркал в самолетах и аэропортах. Стоя потом перед зеркалом в своей квартире, я очень ясно видела физическое выражение хода времени: первые седые волосы, паутинку морщин, более глубокие и отчетливые тени выступающих костей.
Никакая другая мысль не была для меня более успокоительной, чем сознание того, что я умру. В эти минуты прозрения — а себя можно увидеть таким, какой ты есть, только если смотришь на себя как на чужого человека, — все отчаяние, вся веселость, вся депрессия исчезают и сменяются спокойствием. Для меня смерть вовсе не была пугающей, она не была состоянием или событием, которое придет и поразит меня. Она была скорее сосредоточенностью на текущем моменте, поддержкой, союзником, помогающим мыслями быть в настоящем.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“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.”
― Peter Høeg

“As far as I'm concerned, you could send all the cars in the world through a compactor and shoot them out through the stratosphere and put them in orbit around Mars. Except, of course, the taxis that have to be at my disposal when I need them.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“Es gibt nur eine Art und Weise, eine andere Kultur zu verstehen. Sie zu leben. In sie einzuziehen, darum zu bitten, als Gast geduldet zu werden, die Sprache zu lernen. Irgendwann kommt dann vielleicht das Verständnis. Es wird dann immer wortlos sein. In dem Moment, in dem man das Fremde begreift, verliert man den Drang, es zu erklären. Ein Phänomen erklären heißt, sich davon entfernen.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“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.”
― Peter Høeg, The Quiet Girl

“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.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“People under thirty haven't yet stopped believing that something wonderful can suddenly happen.”
― Peter Høeg

“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.”
― Peter Høeg, Borderliners