Quotes from Peter Høeg

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

Do you think that people determine their own lives, Smilla?" "The details," I say, "but the big things happen on their own.

What was meant was that time is something you have to hold on to and the place where we examined it that first time was where the Hornbæk line ran through the school grounds.

As always when an adult becomes transparent, the child inside him steps forth.

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.

I can't imagine that anything like the Christian image of hell actually exists. But lately I've been wondering about the ancient Greenlandic realm of the dead. If you consider all the unpleasantness you encounter while you're alive, it seems improbable that it would all come to an end simply because you're dead.

Geometry exists as an innate phenomenon in our consciousness. In the external world a perfectly formed snow crystal would never exist. But in our consciousness lies the glittering and flawless knowledge of perfect ice.

Love arises when you have a surplus; it disappears when you're reduced to the basic instincts: hunger, sleep, the need for security.

In all living creatures, fear and curiosity are closely related in the brain.

Their haste pulls them out of the conversation, or they try internally to improve the situation, or they're preparing what their next speech will be when you shut up and it's their turn to take the stage.

Linear time has to be envisaged as a huge, endless knife blade scraping its way across the universe, and drawing it along with it. In its wake it leaves an endless broad stripe of past time, ahead of it lies the future, on the knife edge lies the present, in which we live.

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.

The bad thing about death is not that it changes the future. It's that it leaves us alone with our memories.

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.

Those who understand such things say that the two partners must always assist each other if a relationship is truly to founder and turn into flotsam.

En enstaka glödlampa i taket kastade ett milt, gyllene ljus över de lyssnande djuren. Han hade läst hos Martin Buber att det är de mest andliga människorna som står djuren närmast. Också hos Eckehart. I Guds rike är de nära. Det är hos djuren man ska söka Gud.

It grieves my heart.

I'll come, you'll see,' I said. I knew it was a lie, she knew it, too.

The writers see where we're headed before the scientists do. What we discover in nature is not really a matter of what exists; what we find is determined by our ability to understand.

Then the music. It's jazz and yet not jazz. There's something euphoric, disconnected about it. Like four instruments that have run amok. But it fools you. Because there is also a strange precision to it. Like a clown act in a circus ring. What takes the greatest precision is that it's supposed to sound like total chaos.

The true reality of things is not important. What's important is what people believe

When people talk about how fast children forget, how fast they forgive, how sensitive they are, I let it go in one ear and out the other. Children can remember and forget and totally freeze to death the people they don't like.

I'm wearing a pair of high boots, a red turtleneck sweater, a sealskin coat from Groenlandia, and a skirt from Scottish Corner. I've learned that it's always easier to explain things if you're nicely dressed.

You could get my father to state, in all seriousness, that one of his problems is that he isn't half as pleased with himself as he has every reason to be.