On the Calculation of Volume I Quotes

“Maybe we are a weather system—condensation and evaporation: we are together, we look at one another, we touch one another, we condense, we come together, we make love, we fall asleep, we wake and revert to our strange bond, a quiet weather system with no natural disasters.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“The fog had lifted. Those strange days were past. I knew I couldn’t hold onto the morning’s hazy gray light for long, I knew that I had been keeping the past and the present out, that I had been like a human pilot light. Gone were the featureless mornings. Gone, my time at the bottom of the sea, gone and irretrievable. Gone, the fog which had been the greatest bliss but which—it seems to me now—requires one to be in a state of the utmost naivety, to dwell in the halls of folly, to surrender to the gentle grip of apathy.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility. That time stands still. That gravity is suspended. That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“Often, we would simply come to the conclusion that you cannot know everything, that you have to accept some displacement in life, that you have to expect inconsistencies, and that was what we encountered: patterns and inconsistencies, two worlds trying to merge.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“They had an air of peace about them, Marie and Philip, which reminded me of the time, five years ago, when I first met Thomas. The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other - the one person who makes everything simple - a feeling of being calmed and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“It was one thing for me to have encountered a fracture in the normal progression of time,”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“Recalling the way I felt last night, that sense of change and hope, and then my dismay at the rude reversion to the same lopsided moon, I cannot help but feel that the world’s been pulling my leg. That not only was I mistaken, but that I had fallen for an April Fool’s prank. As if the moon had altered its appearance just long enough for me to imagine that there really was a difference, only then to act all innocent just hanging there in the sky, totally deadpan.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“I have exchanged my hope for a mood and a frying pan.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“How can I say it is good that the world stands still? How can I say it is good that it doesn’t move, that there is nothing I can accomplish, that nothing happens? How can that be good? How can it be good that Thomas is slowly being carried farther and farther away? That we are not traveling together? How can I say that? Maybe I should think twice before I write. Anything. Here.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“There is someone in the house.

Dive.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“I have not found a way out of the eighteenth of November, but I have found roads and paths through the day, narrow passages and tunnels I can move along. I cannot get out, but I can find ways in.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“But Thomas was his old self. There was no change there. Our days together had been different, but none of them stuck in his mind or his body. They vanished overnight, passed through him, leaving no trace, and each morning he woke up exactly the same as before. We were living in two different times, our bodies were living in two different times. Not just our memories. Our bodies too.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“The wound had done exactly what one would expect of such a burn, moving through time and changing a little each day. Time acted on my skin and now, when I looked in the bathroom mirror, my eye was also caught by my hair. It was longer. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I could see that my hair had grown, not much, but enough to leave me in no doubt. My face in the mirror looked the same and if there were any changes they were so slight as to be imperceptible, but my hair had grown as the days had passed.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“There was a clarity to the air and instead of a vague awareness of the bed linens, the room and the soft morning light, these things were now the elements of the eighteenth of November, the day’s sharp-edged props. Thomas, lying next to me, was no longer my sleeping husband on some indeterminate morning, but my husband moving away, day by day, my not yet lost love, whose look of surprise I was about to meet, because this was no ordinary morning and I was no longer Tara, half-asleep, nebulously alive and quietly happy, but Tara back in a broken time and yet again I had to explain to Thomas what had happened. I would see his disquiet and hasten to say that he didn’t have to worry, that I was here, that we were together, no one had died, no one had been hurt. I was home, I was all right, we were alive; it was only time that had fallen apart.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“My morning acquired depth and a clear horizon. I didn’t want a horizon, though. I wanted gray morning light and a day that began with no time, no memory and no plans, but that was no longer possible.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“My morning started in the same way as before. I became aware of the room around me, a day unfolding; I could still hold onto the feeling of a gray, misty morning for a few notes of birdsong, four or five notes, later only three, maybe two, no more, then my moment splintered and I remembered everything, my thoughts were already scanning the room, they had drifted to the windowsill, out into the morning, to the birds in the tree, to houses and streets where, one after another, people were entering the eighteenth of November in a firmly established pattern, convinced that they were embarking on this day for the very first time.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“The minute we deviate from simple, practical matters, the conversation lapses imperceptibly into a kind of audio link, a muted love mumble. Our communication, initially meaningful and coherent, turns into a series of fitful exchanges containing neither sentences nor information: little words and sounds meant -- I suppose -- to keep the link between us open, but which, instead, make all too clear how far apart we are.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“Like waking to something that hasn’t quite taken shape and feeling, for a few moments, that everything is the same as always. Like mornings in strange rooms when you think you have woken up in your own bed, until you realize that the door is in the wrong place, the bed linens are unfamiliar, the room is different. Or like the mornings of childhood that present themselves as perfectly ordinary days, but then turn out to be Christmas Day or a birthday.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside our control, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or even that of smaller particles.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I

“That is how the days began: with an undefined morning. There is the grey light from the window. There is the birdsong, the sound of rain. There is the feel of the bed linen against my skin, the faint sound of the wind in the trees, a soft sighing in the morning air.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“I am sitting at a table with a pile of paper in front of me on which I have written that it is the eighteenth of November and that my name is Tara Selter. I feel as if I am no longer alone. As if someone is listening. My days have not been lost to oblivion. They exist. My days exist in my pile of paper, they have not been erased during the night, the paper remembers and on it I can see that it says day number this and day number that and the eighteenth of November but never the nineteenth.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I