Quotes from Carsten Jensen

Two drowning people can't save each other. All they can do is drag each other down.

You died in the end, but you fought first.

Life had taught him about something far more complicated than justice. Its name was balance.

Is there anything more heartbreaking than drowning in sight of land? Is there a single one of us who hasn't at least once felt haunted by the fear of slipping away within sight of a safe haven?

We thought we knew everything about him. But that's not how life is. When all's said and done, we can never truly know one another.

That's the strange thing about a good story. No pleasure if you can't share it.

Hope can be like a plant that sprouts and grows and keeps people alive. But it can also be a wound that refuses to heal.

Now I remembered a captain's honor and his only duty: to bring his crew back alive.

Everyone in our town has a story--but it's not the one he tells himself. Its author has a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, and five hundred pens that never stop scribbling.

We were familiar with the line that separates grief from madness, and we know that sometimes the only way to stay on the right side of it is to scream.

We don't sail because the sea is there. We sail because there's a harbour. We don't start by heading for distant shores. We seek protection first.

Our mother sticks a knife in our heart when we say goodbye on the wharf. And we stick a knife in hers when we go. And that's how we're connected: through the hurt we inflict on one another.

That's how it is, he told himself. If you dread something enough, even your worst fears coming true brings comfort.

Though I had no respect for Jack Lewis, I respected the hole in his chest. He was dying, and you owe the dying your attention.

Nature was neither fair nor unfair. Those terms belonged to the world of men.

Freedom had a thousand faces. But so did crime. The thought of what a man might do made me dizzy.

Even terror needs a yardstick, and surely the yardstick for the unknown is the known?

When it came to choosing between education and religion, Albert said, he'd choose education every time. The school represented young people and the future - and the church didn't. If the school in Vestergade was bigger than the church, so much the better. Any town that believed in the future should take note.

But tonight we danced with the drowned. And they were us.

There shall come a day when all the women in the world will lie in the gutter screaming for cock,' he intoned. 'But not an inch shall they be given!' 'Am I to understand,' Knud Erik asked, 'that nobody wanted to screw you?

That's how we're connected: through the hurt we inflict on one another.

Contrary to what most people think, weeping isn't an uncontrollable emotion that spills into tears. It's the opposite, a channel for feelings, a way to divert them in a healthy direction.

No, he hadn't known anything about children, but now he'd learned something: a child's mind is open to everything.

The women's song was always the same, as monotonous as the beating of the waves against the beach: loss, loss. The conch offered them no enchantment. When they put their ear to it, all they heard was the echo of their mourning.