The Fly Trap Quotes

“Every summer there are a number of nights, not many, but a number, when everything is perfect. The light, the warmth, the smells, the mist, the birdsong – the moths. Who can sleep? Who wants to?”
― Fredrik Sjöberg, The Fly Trap

“It’s said to be the same all over the world, in all seven seas. Islands are matriarchies of a kind seldom seen on land. The men – as Iceland’s president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir remarked on one occasion when the subject arose – the men flee to their own preferred landscape, which is the sea.”
― Fredrik Sjöberg, The Fly Trap

“Or it might be better to say that all of us need to flee blindly from time to time so as not to become copies of the world’s expectations, and maybe, too, to give us the courage to remember some of those great, bold thoughts that made a child get up in the night, heart pounding, and write down a secret promise for his life.”
― Fredrik Sjöberg, The Fly Trap: A Memoir

“Some days I tell myself that my mission is to say something about the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation. And the legibility of landscape. Other days are more dismal. As if I were queueing in the rain outside confessional literature’s nudist colony, mirrors everywhere, blue with cold.”
― Fredrik Sjöberg, The Fly Trap

“Niente favorisce la concentrazione come la consapevolezza di una limitazione del tempo, e a volte anche dello spazio.”
― Fredrik Sjöberg, The Fly Trap

“So it goes when you travel for the sake of something to say. Your eyes go weak.”
― Fredrik Sjöberg, The Fly Trap: A Memoir

“We are quiet, contemplative people, and our behaviour in the field is relatively aristocratic. Running is not necessarily beneath our dignity but it is in any case pointless because the flies move much too fast. Consequencly, we stand still, as if on guard, and moreover almost exclusively in blazing sunshine, little breeze and fragrant flowers. Passersby can therefore easily get the impression that the fly hunter is a convalescent of some kind, momentarily lost in meditation. This is not wholly inaccurate.”
― Fredrik Sjöberg, The Fly Trap

“Le lacune crescono al ritmo del sapere.”
― Fredrik Sjöberg, The Fly Trap

“Spiegare la rarità è un’arte, né più né meno.”
― Fredrik Sjöberg, The Fly Trap

“Against all odds, some poor presbyopic chump takes a shot at it, maybe so he won’t make himself ill by sensing a truth no one else sees. And he falls flat on his face, of course, his truth as incomprehensible and strange as it was to begin with. But at least he’s tried. And”
― Fredrik Sjöberg, The Fly Trap: A Memoir

“finally it became obvious that my talents lay with flies. That’s a fate that takes some getting used to. Anyway, the hoverflies are only props. No, not only, but to some extent. Here and there, my story is about something else. Exactly what, I don’t know. Some days I tell myself that my mission is to say something about the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation. And the legibility of landscape. Other days are more dismal. As if I were queueing in the rain outside confessional literature’s nudist colony, mirrors everywhere, blue with cold. But”
― Fredrik Sjöberg, The Fly Trap: A Memoir