Peter Høeg quotes
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“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 HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2010). “Smilla's Sense of Snow: A Novel”, p.222, Macmillan
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“There's a widespread notion that children are open, that the truth about their inner selves just seeps out of them. That's all wrong. No one is more covert than a child, and no one has a greater need to be that way. It's a response to a world that's always using a can opener to open them up to see what's inside, wondering whether it ought to be replaced with a more useful sort of preserves.”
-- Peter Høeg -
“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 HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2010). “Smilla's Sense of Snow: A Novel”, p.13, Macmillan
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“If you want to support others you have to stay upright yourself.”
-- Peter HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2013). “Borderliners: A Novel”, p.52, Macmillan
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“Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions.”
-- Peter HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2010). “Smilla's Sense of Snow: A Novel”, p.339, Macmillan
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“There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language.”
-- Peter Høeg -
“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 HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2010). “Smilla's Sense of Snow: A Novel”, p.55, Macmillan
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“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 HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2013). “Tales of the Night”, p.309, Macmillan
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“The body's pain is so paper-thin and insignificant compared to that of the mind.”
-- Peter HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2010). “Smilla's Sense of Snow: A Novel”, p.501, Macmillan
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“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 Høeg -
“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 Høeg -
“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 Høeg -
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“I don't fall in love anymore. Just like I don't get the mumps.”
-- Peter Høeg -
“When you're young, you think that sex is the culmination of intimacy. Later you discover that it's barely the beginning.”
-- Peter HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2010). “Smilla's Sense of Snow: A Novel”, p.450, Macmillan
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“Grief is a gift, something you have to earn.”
-- Peter Høeg -
“It's these small differences in people's karma that determine if we get up or remain lying on the ground.”
-- Peter HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2015). “The Quiet Girl”, p.59, Random House
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“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 HøegSource : "The Quiet Girl". Book by Peter Høeg, 2006.
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“I'm no expert on types of cars. As far as i'm concerned, you could send all the cars in the world through a compactor and shoot them out into 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 Høeg -
“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 Høeg -
“People under thirty haven't yet stopped believing that something wonderful can suddenly happen.”
-- Peter Høeg -
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“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 Høeg -
“Never do I close my door behind me without being conscious that I am carrying out an act of charity towards myself.”
-- Peter Høeg -
“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 Høeg -
“To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost.”
-- Peter HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2010). “Smilla's Sense of Snow: A Novel”, p.40, Macmillan
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“Confronted with people who have power, and who enjoy using it, I turn into a different person, a baser and meaner one.”
-- Peter Høeg -
“..That's where we humans make a mistake. We don't see the utterly amazing when it comes to us disguised as the ordinary.”
-- Peter HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2015). “The Quiet Girl”, p.175, Random House
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“Maybe it's wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.”
-- Peter Høeg -
“The problem with anger against God is that it's impossible to go higher in the system to complain.”
-- Peter Høeg -
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“She was transparent, like a watercolor. As if she were about to dissolve in sound, in tones not yet created.”
-- Peter Høeg -
“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 Høeg -
“Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.”
-- Peter HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2010). “Smilla's Sense of Snow: A Novel”, p.131, Macmillan
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“It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly.”
-- Peter Høeg -
“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 HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2013). “Borderliners: A Novel”, p.156, Macmillan
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“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 HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2013). “Borderliners: A Novel”, p.21, Macmillan
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“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 Høeg -
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“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 HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2013). “Borderliners: A Novel”, p.35, Macmillan
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“We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror.”
-- Peter Høeg -
“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 Høeg -
“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 HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2010). “Smilla's Sense of Snow: A Novel”, p.316, Macmillan
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“The motive for our actions doesn't lie ahead of us. It's something behind us that we're trying to escape.”
-- Peter Høeg -
“Perhaps it's true that love is eternal. But it's appearance changes all the time.”
-- Peter HøegSource : Peter Høeg (2015). “The Quiet Girl”, p.285, Random House
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“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 Høeg -
“Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease.”
-- Peter Høeg -
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“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 Høeg
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