Quotes from Peter Høeg

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Falling in love has been greatly overrated. Falling in love consists of forty-five per cent fear of not being accepted and forty-five per cent manic hope that this time the fear will be put to shame, and a modest ten per cent frail awareness of the possibility of love. [...] Falling in love is a form of madness. Closely related to hatred, coldness, resentment, intoxication, and suicide.

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

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

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

Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition.

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

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.

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.

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

Verliebtheiten werden maßlos überschätzt. Verliebtheiten bestehen zu fünfundvierzig Prozent aus der Furcht davor, nicht akzeptiert zu werden, zu fünfundvierzig Prozent aus der manischen Hoffnung, dass diese Furcht ausgerechnet diesmal beschämt wird, und zu bescheidenen zehn Prozent aus dem zerbrechlichen Gefühl für die Möglichkeit der Liebe.

There's no simple aritmetic for life's distribution of happiness and sorrow, no such thing as a standard share.

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 greater cause to be that way. It's a response to a world that is always using a tin-opener on them to see what they have inside, just in case it ought to be replaced with a more useful type of tinned foodstuff.

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.