On the Calculation of Volume IV Quotes

“The world is not a calm sea where all you have to do is refrain from rocking the boat, she said. The world is a rocking boat, a ship in a storm, and when you're capsized, that's why. Because the world is a place that throws you overboard.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume IV

“#2313 We are many in the house. Heard all day long as Karna chops wood in the garden, the sewing machines hum along in the basement, a low thrum when you stand by the basement stairs or sit in the drawing room, and suddenly Karna has chopped her way to a woodpile in the shed and a basket of logs by the fireplace, and the machines in the basement have hummed their way to a shirt and a dress, and here by the window, where I’ve settled into a chair, I hear it all: always someone verbing their way to nouns, sewing their way to bedspreads and cushions, kneading their way to bread in the kitchen, slicing their way to salads and stews and November soups, folding their way to neat stacks of laundry to be distributed among the bedrooms, or now, as I write my way to filled sheets of paper in a chair, in a house.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume IV

“suddenly Olga felt the urge to go outside, into the night. She suggested that, for once, we take a nocturnal stroll together. That in the dark you feel a little more like a human being.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume IV

“Peter was insistent. There were limits to how much knowledge we could expect to have. Past peoples could see the sun rise, so they called it a sunrise because that was what they saw: an object moving upward. Should they have investigated the matter, taken a more exhaustive approach? Should they have refrained from mentioning the sun until after Copernicus? Or later still? Should they have said that unfortunately they couldn’t talk about the path of the yellow disk for another few thousand years, until someone had discovered that it was we, and the planet on which we live, who move around the sun? That it is not a disk, but a sphere. That it is neither yellow, orange, nor red, but that the atmosphere lends it its color. When do we know enough to give things names? When is it time to scrap the words we have and invent new ones?”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume IV

“Jeg spurgte, om ikke vi kunne have nogle stykker at vælge imellem, at vi hver især kunne bruge det ord, der føltes mest præcist, og så kunne vi håbe på en eller anden grad af forståelse. At rummeligheden også kunne være i vores hoveder, ikke nødvendigvis i ordene selv. Jeg syntes ikke, det var den store tragedie, hvis man bad nogen om at hente en kop, og de så kom tilbage med et krus. Hvor vigtigt var det, om vores smedejernsport blev kaldt en låge eller en port? Så længe den blev åbnet, når nogen skulle ind. Men så sagde Sonia, at hvis det var sådan man kommunikerede på en operationsstue, risikerede patienten at dø. En kop er ikke et krus. Og måske har man i virkeligheden brug for et bæger. Præcision er ikke, at ordene er rummelige, sagde hun henvendt til Olga. Præ- cision er, at ordene er skarpe. Skarpe og smalle og lige til at plukke op fra bakken med kirurgiske instrumenter.”
― Solvej Balle, Om udregning af rumfang IV