Quotes from Peter Høeg

Tell us, they'll say to me. So we will understand and be able to resolve things. They'll be mistaken. It's only the things you don't understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution.

For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad.' Mark 4:22.

Maybe this is where his humanity lies, in the traces of growing up with a sense of unfathomable insecurity: the need to plan, to make his world predictable.

if you restrict earthly things, you set up your thoughts free for the spiritual.

Europeans need easy explanations; they will always choose a simple lie over a contradictory truth.

like many elderly people, she has developed a selective sense of hearing. She ignores me and continues on her own track...

If you have to wait for a long time, you have to seize hold of the waiting or it will become destructive. If you let things slide, your consciousness will waver, awakening fear and restlessness, then depression strikes, and you're pulled down.

I have lost the sense of how to tackle a believing European.

This could be one reason I've never burdened my life with children—I've thought too much about why people lose the courage to look each other in the eye.

Very few people know how to listen. Their haste pulls them out of the conversation, or they try internally to improve the situation, or they're preparing what their entrance will be when you shut up and it's their turn to step on stage.

First there is simply irritation at the whole impractical situation. Then there is the feeling that always comes over me at the mere thought of that book: veneration. The knowledge that it is the foundation, the boundary. That if you work your way backwards, past Lobachevsky and Newton and as far back as you can go, you end up at Euclid.

The French cranium measurers ran into serious problems in Greenland.

So the [Binet-Simon]test results were always related to time. Thereby producing a new figure -- a measurement of intelligence. A calculated figure,and hence quite objective, All the psychologist had done was to let the children read and answer the questions, record them on a tape, note the times, double-check the figures and refer to the evaluation table. Everything clear and obvious. So that the result was, by and large, exempt from human uncertainty. Almost scientific.

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

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.

I sit there in total silence. It's always interesting to leave Europeans in silence. For them it's a vacuum in which the tension grows and converges toward the intolerable.

You can learn something about your fellow human beings from what they write in the margin

If you want to know who the real heroes of world history are, just look at the mothers.

Deep within every blind, absolute love grows a hatred toward the beloved, who now holds the only existing key to happiness. I was, as I said, only three years old, but I remember how he left. He

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

Bertrand Russell wrote that pure mathematics is the field in which we don't know what we're talking about or to what extent what we say is true or false.

in our consciousness lies the glittering and flawless knowledge of perfect ice.

Where's tomorrow?

Det ser ut som en krypta. - Döden är förtroendeingivande. Alla banker är inredda som gravvalv.