Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

You can’t experience being alive without realizing that you have to die, she thought. But it’s just as impossible to realize you have to die without thinking how incredibly amazing it is to be alive.

How tragic that most people had to get ill before they understood what a gift it was to be alive.

What is the most important thing in life? If we ask someone living on the edge of starvation, the answer is food. If we ask someone dying of cold, the answer is warmth. If we put the same question to someone who feels lonely and isolated, the answer will probably be the company of other people.

It seems as if in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world.

saved her from the triviality of everyday existence.

Grownups took the world for granted. They had let themselves be lulled into the enchanted sleep of their humdrum existence once and for all.

‘Everything flows,’ said Heraclitus. Everything is in constant flux and movement, nothing is abiding. Therefore we ‘cannot step twice into the same river.’ When I step into the river for the second time, neither I nor the river are the same.

Love binds things together, and strife separates them.