“The motive for our actions doesn’t lie ahead of us. It’s something behind us that we’re trying to escape.”
— Peter Høeg
“There is a pleasant firmness of tone when one is in harmony with oneself. Even when it’s a weak ethic one is resonating with.”
— 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
“Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition.”
— Peter Høeg
“Deep within every blind, absolute love grows a hatred toward the beloved, who now holds the only existing key to happiness”
— Peter Høeg
“We all try to camouflage the monotony, But it takes a lot of energy. To insist on being special all the time. When we’re so much like one another anyway. Our triumphs are the same. Our pain. Try for a moment to feel what relief there is in the ordinary.”
— Peter Høeg
“… Because one who seeks the highest must not leave any path untried.”
— Peter Høeg
“No matter how close people get, they never reach each other. Including us now. Even now, there’s a place where each of us is alone.”
— Peter Høeg
“Cantor illustrated the concept of infinity for his students by telling them that there was once a man who had a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and the hotel was fully occupied. Then one more guest arrived. So the owner moved the guest in room number 1 into room number 2; the guest in room number 2 into number 3; the guest in 3 into room 4, and so on. In that way room number 1 became vacant for the new guest.What delights me about this story is that everyone involved, the guests and the owner, accept it as perfectly natural to carry out an infinite number of operations so that one guest can have peace and quiet in a room of his own. That is a great tribute to solitude.”
— Peter Høeg
“One can only ask to play as well as possible the notes one is given.”
— Peter Høeg
“One should be good to oneself. Especially when one is alone.”
— Peter Høeg
“Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease.”
— Peter Høeg
“Danes express their strongest feelings in conjunction with food. That became clear to me the first time I was out visiting friends with Moritz. When I took a third helping of cookies, he looked straight at me.”Keep on taking until you’re ashamed of yourself,” he said.I wasn’t confident about my Danish, but I understood what he meant. I helped myself three more times. Without taking my eyes off him. The room disappeared, the people we were visiting disappeared, I didn’t taste the cookies. Only Moritz existed.”I’m still not ashamed,” I said.I helped myself three more times. Then he grabbed the platter and put it out of my reach. I had won. The first of a long series of small, important victories over him and Danish manners.”
— 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
“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.”
— Peter Høeg
“It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly.”
— Peter Høeg
“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.”
— Peter Høeg
“No person can open another person, All we can do is wait. And then work with the openness when it occur.s.”
— Peter Høeg
“To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost.”
— 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
“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.”
— Peter Høeg
“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.”
— Peter Høeg
“Around a child, people come and go, objects appear and are taken away, surroundings take shape and disintegrate. And no explanation is given, because how can you explain the world to a child?So she had used the words. Words call forth and secure that which has gone away. With her lists she had ensured that whatever she had once known would come back”
— Peter Høeg
“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.”
— 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
“A child who is born is something to seek out, something to search for, a star, a northern light, a column of energy in the universe. And a child who dies-that’s an abomination.”
— Peter Høeg
“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.”
— Peter Høeg
“When you’re young, you think that sex is the culmination of intimacy. Later you discover that it’s barely the beginning.”
— Peter Høeg
“On closer examination, we are simply a banal tragedy spread over two generations.”
— Peter Høeg
“The fear for oneself, that one can do something about. Upon it one can turn the light of awareness. But when one is no longer worrying about oneself, then the fear comes for other people and, after that, for the world.There are no fearless people, only fearless moments.”
— Peter Høeg