Peter Høeg Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Deep inside I know that trying to fathom 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 Høeg
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 Høeg
Contrary to what adults believe the joy of children at play comes not from having no knowledge of Death – every living creature has that. It comes from their divining what the grown-ups have lost sight of; that even though Death makes a fierce opponent, it is not invincible.

Peter Høeg
Time is no law of nature. It is a plan. When you look at it with awareness, or start to touch it, then it starts to disintegrate.

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

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

Peter Høeg
I have hydrophobia. But I know something about ice.

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

Peter Høeg
The problem with anger against God is that it's impossible to go higher in the system to complain.

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

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

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

Peter Høeg
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 Høeg
Reading snow is like listening to music. To describe what you've read is to try to explain music in writing.

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

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