Peter Hoeg Quotes & Sayings

He boils milk with fresh ginger, a quarter of a vanilla bean, and tea that is so dark and fine-leaved that it looks like black dust. He strains it and puts cane sugar in both our cups. There's something euphorically invigorating and yet filling about it. It tastes the way I imagine the Far East must taste. — Peter Hoeg

But even they it was as though the time that the clock measured was not put to any use. For by far the majority of Europe's population, namely those living outside of the towns -- and, strictly speaking, also for those living in them -- the day began at dawn and ended with the onset of darkness, and work was regulated by the changing of the seasons.
What fascinated people about he measurement of time was not time itself, because that was dictated by other factors. What fascinated them was the clock. — Peter Hoeg

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 Hoeg

To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost. — Peter Hoeg

The greatest performances where when fingertips took away a very thin veil between people and uncovered the universe in its entirety. — Peter Hoeg

For my part, I never talk to the child about time. We talk about other things
though not about anything much
and never about tomorrow. For me that is impossible. Tomorrow we could all be wiped out. You think back upon all the promises you did not manage to keep. Talk about time and you will always end up making promises. Then it is better to say nothing at all, no matter what. — Peter Hoeg

Deep within every blind, absolute love grows a hatred toward the beloved, who now holds the only existing key to happiness — Peter Hoeg

Danes express their strongest feelings in conjunction with food. That became clear to me the first time I was out visiting friends with Moritz. When I took a third helping of cookies, he looked straight at me.
"Keep on taking until you're ashamed of yourself," he said.
I wasn't confident about my Danish, but I understood what he meant. I helped myself three more times. Without taking my eyes off him. The room disappeared, the people we were visiting disappeared, I didn't taste the cookies. Only Moritz existed.
"I'm still not ashamed," I said.
I helped myself three more times. Then he grabbed the platter and put it out of my reach. I had won. The first of a long series of small, important victories over him and Danish manners. — Peter Hoeg

If you have to wait for a long time, you have to seize hold of the waiting or it will become destructive. If you let things slide, your consciousness will waver, awakening fear and restlessness, then depression strikes, and you're pulled down. — Peter Hoeg

I have sat in the dark and looked at them both, the child and the woman. And the feeling has become too much. It is not sorrow or joy; it is the weight and the pressure of having been brought into their lives, and of knowing that if one were ever to be separated from them, it would mean your obliteration. — Peter Hoeg

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 Hoeg

No one who has lived side by side with animals that have plenty of room can ever visit the zoo. — Peter Hoeg

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 Hoeg

Grief is a gift, something you have to earn. — Peter Hoeg

It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly. — Peter Hoeg

Thinking about the way you remembered your past. What you remembered, she said, was a string of events and years stretching back from the point where you now found yourself. In other words, a line of time. This might be coloured differently, depending upon what had happened to you. For example, if you had lost someone then it would be black. Other spots might be lighter. On some sections of the line time would have passed quickly, on other sections more slowly. But, for a long way back, it would still be a line. — Peter Hoeg

Cantor illustrated the concept of infinity for his students by telling them that there was once a man who had a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and the hotel was fully occupied. Then one more guest arrived. So the owner moved the guest in room number 1 into room number 2; the guest in room number 2 into number 3; the guest in 3 into room 4, and so on. In that way room number 1 became vacant for the new guest.
What delights me about this story is that everyone involved, the guests and the owner, accept it as perfectly natural to carry out an infinite number of operations so that one guest can have peace and quiet in a room of his own. That is a great tribute to solitude. — Peter Hoeg

There in bed, happiness comes over me. Not like something that belongs to me, but like a wheel of fire rolling through the room and the world. For a moment I think I'll manage to let it pass and be able to lie there, aware of what I have, and not wish for anything more. The next moment I want to hang on. I want it to continue. He has to lie beside me tomorrow, too. This is my chance. My only, my last chance. I swing my legs onto the floor. Now I'm panic-stricken. This is what I've been working to avoid for thirty-seven years. I've systematically practiced the only thing in the world that is worth learning. How to renounce. I've stopped hoping for anything. When experienced humility becomes an Olympic discipline, I'll be on the national team. I've never had any patience for other people's unhappy love affairs. I hate their weakness. — Peter Hoeg

I'm not crying about anything or anyone in particular. The life I live I created for myself, and I wouldn't want it any different. I cry because in the universe there is something as beautiful as Kremer playing the Brains violin concerto. — Peter Hoeg

She looked at him. As if she wanted to determine his molecular weight. — Peter Hoeg

When you're young, you think that sex is the culmination of intimacy. Later you discover that it's barely the beginning. — Peter Hoeg

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 Hoeg

One can only ask to play as well as possible the notes one is given. — Peter Hoeg

Some girls are fortunate enough to be in love with deep and intelligent boys," she says. "And then there's the rest of us, who have to make do. — Peter Hoeg

A child who is born is something to seek out, something to search for, a star, a northern light, a column of energy in the universe. And a child who dies-that's an abomination. — Peter Hoeg

I don't know if you're in love with someone. If you're not, there's something I would like to say to you, and that is that love comes to everyone. All fifteen years of my experience in life tell me that the world is organized in such a way that all of us find someone to love. Unless we work against it. So if you're not in love with anyone but would like to be, you should try to discover which part of you is working against it. — Peter Hoeg

Even the raven started out in human form, and he fumbled blindly, and his actions were haphazard until it was revealed to him who he was and what his purpose was. — Peter Hoeg

Fermat wrote in the margin: "I've discovered a truly wonderful proof for this argument. Unfortunately, this margin is too narrow to contain it." Two — Peter Hoeg

Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease. — Peter Hoeg

The motive for our actions doesn't lie ahead of us. It's something behind us that we're trying to escape. — Peter Hoeg

There's nothing under the sun as grotesque as cold European courtesy manifested in the third and fourth worlds. — Peter Hoeg

Hat's where we humans make a mistake. We don't see the utterly amazing when it comes to us disguised as the ordinary. — Peter Hoeg

The regularity of the clock was a metaphor for the accuracy of the universe. For the accuracy of God's creative achievement. So the clock was, first and foremost, a metaphor.
Like a work of art. And that is how it was. The clock has been like a work of art, a product of the laboratory, a question.
And then, at some point, this has changed. At some point the clock has stopped being a question. Instead it has become the answer. — Peter Hoeg

With age I have voluntarily chosen certain limitations. I don't have the energy to start over again. To learn new skills or fight my own personality or figure out diesel engines. — Peter Hoeg

Back then I could not understand one word of what I read.
Reading did, however, give me heart. Even if you cannot understand what you are reading you can get something from books. — Peter Hoeg

SheAlmighty had tuned each person in a musical key, and Kasper could hear it. Best in the brief, unguarded moments when people were nearby but didn't yet know he was listening. So he waited by the window, as he was doing now. — Peter Hoeg

We who are profoundly joined in soul can only but heal the ruptures of the cosmos. — Peter Hoeg

We all live our lives blindly believing in the people who make the decisions. Believing in science. Because the world is inscrutable and all information is hazy. We accept the existence of a round globe, of an atom's nucleus that sticks together like drops, of a shrinking universe
and the necessity of interfering with genetic material. Not because we know these things are true, but because we believe the people who tell us so. we are all proselytes of science. And, in contrast to the followers of other religions, we can no longer bridge the gap between ourselves and the priests. Problems arise when we stumble on an outright lie. And it affects our own lives ... that of a child who for the first time catches his parents in a lie he had always suspected. — Peter Hoeg

He has a light, fumbling brutality, which several times makes me think that this time it'll cost me my sanity. In our dawning, mutual intimacy, I induce him to open the little slit in the head of his penis so I can put my clitoris inside and fuck him. — Peter Hoeg

Basker possesses three kinds of bite: a snap, a nip, and then something like a buzz saw and an angle grinder mounted on a bear trap. — Peter Hoeg

The great systems that inform the world about the truth and life invariably claim to be absolutely truthful and well-balanced. In reality they are quaking bridges built out of yearning. — Peter Hoeg

Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions. — Peter Hoeg

The knives in my apartment are only sharp enough to open envelopes with. Cutting a slice of coarse bread is on the borderline of their ability. I don't need anything sharper. Otherwise, on bad days, it might easily occur to me that I could always go stand in the bathroom in front of the mirror and slit my throat. On such occasions it's nice to have the added security of needing to go downstairs and borrow a decent knife from a neighbor. — Peter Hoeg

Nothing corrupts like happiness. It makes us think that since we share this moment, we can also share the past. — Peter Hoeg

The life of every person concerns something of significance. You may not be all that well fitted, but no matter. The significant factor is human nature. Against it you can perpetrate a fair amount of violence, but if it becomes too much, then you are destroyed.
It is as though science has felt that human nature was something within you were confined. Like being in detention on a red warrant. And so they have tried to push against it, as though to break out. And then it has all gone wrong.
...
Nature is not a straitjacket that must be burst open. Nature is a blessing, an opportunity for growth that has been bestowed upon all living things. — Peter Hoeg

Love has something to do with recognition, We can be fascinated by the unknown, we can be attracted by it, but love is something that grows, slowly, in an atmosphere of trust. — Peter Hoeg

There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it. — Peter Hoeg

The child had wanted attention. She had just asked to be noticed. But she was given an assessment. 'What a clever girl! — Peter Hoeg

People under thirty haven't yet stopped believing that something wonderful can suddenly happen. — Peter Hoeg

When people are going to be taken from you anyway, then it would be better if you had never come to care for them. — Peter Hoeg

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 Hoeg

One adopted their language, that of the teachers and the schools, one had none of one's own. At first it was like a release, like a key, like a road. The only road in.
Much later one discovers that what one was let into, at that time, was a tunnel. From which one can never again escape. Not entirely. Not in this life. — Peter Hoeg

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 Hoeg

Reading snow is like listening to music. To describe what you've read is like explaining music in writing. — Peter Hoeg

Because one who seeks the highest must not leave any path untried. — Peter Hoeg

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 Hoeg

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 Hoeg

When you are in the company of people who look down upon themselves as though they were animals, you too become like an animal. Or worse, because animals do not despise themselves. — Peter Hoeg

Time is a sphere made up of language, colours, smells, senses and sounds, a sphere in which you and the world coexist, an instrument with which to put the world in order and comprehend it, one of the reasons for your survival.
But if time grows too tight, then it becomes a reason for doing away with yourself.
Time is not an illusion. Nor is it the only reality. It is one possible, widespread form for encounters between the mind and the surrounding world. But not the only possible one. If you are driven by curiosity, or if you are ill and cannot survive any other way, then you can enter the laboratory and touch time. And then it will change. — Peter Hoeg

There's a plan the school ... So many things happen, you're never given any explanation. We are going to study it scientifically, like in a laboratory. — Peter Hoeg

It's the kind of day that might make you wonder about the meaning of life, and discover that there is none. — Peter Hoeg

On closer examination, we are simply a banal tragedy spread over two generations. — Peter Hoeg

There can be great depths of love that are not reciprocated. — Peter Hoeg

No person can open another person, All we can do is wait. And then work with the openness when it occur.s. — Peter Hoeg

Never do I close my door behind me without being conscious that I am carrying out an act of charity towards myself. — Peter Hoeg

It's these small differences in people's karma that determine if we get up or remain lying on the ground. — Peter Hoeg

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 Hoeg

Maybe a person can be born to the wrong people," he said. "Maybe a person should have been put somewhere else. — Peter Hoeg

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 Hoeg

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 Hoeg

Some thoughts have glue on them.----Smilla — Peter Hoeg

I'm not perfect. I think more highly of snow and ice than love. It's easier for me to be interested in mathematics than to have affection for my fellow human beings. But I am anchored to something in life that is constant. You can call it a sense of orientation; you can call it woman's intuition; you can call it whatever you like. I'm standing on a foundation and have no farther to fall. It could be that I haven't managed to organize my life very well. But I always have a grip - with at least one finger at a time - on Absolute Space. That's why there's a limit to how far the world can twist out of joint, and to how badly things can go before I find out. I now know, without a shadow of a doubt, that something is wrong. I — Peter Hoeg

And yet, quite often, she comes to me. Seldom to have anything explained, but often to tell me something.
When she comes over to me, I sit down on the floor. It does not seem right to tower over her when she is talking to me. Instead I sit down, then our heads are on a level. — Peter Hoeg

There is a pleasant firmness of tone when one is in harmony with oneself. Even when it's a weak ethic one is resonating with. — Peter Hoeg

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 Hoeg

No matter how close people get, they never reach each other. Including us now. Even now, there's a place where each of us is alone. — Peter Hoeg

She was transparent, like a watercolor. As if she were about to dissolve in sound, in tones not yet created. — Peter Hoeg

So the [Binet-Simon]test results were always related to time. Thereby producing a new figure
a measurement of intelligence. A calculated figure,and hence quite objective, All the psychologist had done was to let the children read and answer the questions, record them on a tape, note the times, double-check the figures and refer to the evaluation table. Everything clear and obvious. So that the result was, by and large, exempt from human uncertainty.
Almost scientific. — Peter Hoeg

In ten years they would be dead, deported or in leadership positions. — Peter Hoeg

The body's pain is so paper-thin and insignificant compared to that of the mind. — Peter Hoeg

You draw something ... and you get nothing. The you do the same thing again, but this time you get a star and are praised, how come?
...
It's something to do with time ... You got a star because you spent more time on the second drawing. And spent the time in a particular way. We think they have a plan, and that it has to do with time.
...
There's no such thing as better ... The second one just fitted in better with their plan. — Peter Hoeg

So it is not fundamentally possible to be alone. Fundamentally, man has to be with other people. If man becomes totally, totally alone, then he is lost. — Peter Hoeg

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 Hoeg

Perhaps it's true that love is eternal. But it's appearance changes all the time. — Peter Hoeg

When we say 'time', I believe we mean at least two things. We mean changes. And we mean something unchangeable. We mean something that moves . but against an unmoving background. And vice versa.
Animals can sense changes. But consciousness of time involves the double sense of constancy and change. Which can only be attributed to those who give expression to it. And that can only be done through language, and only man has language.
The perception of time and language are inextricably bound up with one another. — Peter Hoeg

I like him. I have a weakness for losers. Invalids, foreigners, the fat boy of the class, the ones nobody ever wants to dance with. My heart beats for them. Maybe because I've always known that in some way I will forever be one of them. — Peter Hoeg

Deep inside I know that trying to figure things out leads to blindness, that the desire to understand has a built-in brutality that erases what you seek to comprehend. Only experience is sensitive. — Peter Hoeg

There are mornings when it feels as if you rise up to the surface through a mud bath. With your feet stuck in a block of cement. When you know that you've expired in the night and have nothing to be happy about except the fact that at least you've already died so they can't transplant your lifeless organs. — Peter Hoeg

We all try to camouflage the monotony, But it takes a lot of energy. To insist on being special all the time. When we're so much like one another anyway. Our triumphs are the same. Our pain. Try for a moment to feel what relief there is in the ordinary. — Peter Hoeg

One should be good to oneself. Especially when one is alone. — Peter Hoeg

You spend your whole life believing that you will always be on the outside or on the borderline. You struggle and struggle, and yet it all seems to be in vain. And then, suddenly, you are allowed inside and lifted up into the light. — Peter Hoeg

I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages. — Peter Hoeg

Maybe I should give up and go back the way I came. But I stay. I detest fear. I hate being scared. There is only one path to fearlessness. It's the one that leads into the mysterious center of the terror. — Peter Hoeg

If you want to know who the real heroes of world history are, just look at the mothers. — Peter Hoeg

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 Hoeg

The flakes are the size of tiny feathers, and that's the way snow is, it's not necessarily cold. — Peter Hoeg

You have to have a place where you can gather your thoughts. Like people who pray. That is what is difficult here at the school. Peter says it is like glass tunnels.
...
It is already under way. It is the middle of a period, we are not where the plan says we should be, we have stepped out of the glass tunnel. The experiment is already under way. Something is happening to us, can you feel it? What is it? What's happening is that you are starting to become restless, you want to get back, you can feel time passing. That feeling is your chance, you can feel your way and learn something you would otherwise never have seen. Like when I came late on purpose. I stepped out of the tunnel I was used to walking along, I saw Biehl, and I noticed something ... He's scared too. — Peter Hoeg

Around a child, people come and go, objects appear and are taken away, surroundings take shape and disintegrate. And no explanation is given, because how can you explain the world to a child?
So she had used the words. Words call forth and secure that which has gone away. With her lists she had ensured that whatever she had once known would come back — Peter Hoeg

Confronted with people who have power, and who enjoy using it, I turn into a different person, a baser and meaner one. — Peter Hoeg

April light was unlike any other. It had a charming, optimistic unreliability like an overbid hand in poker. It gave a promise of spring that it wasn't sure it could keep. — Peter Hoeg