Quotes by 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.

Ive had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, Im also helpless in two or three other languages.

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 youre ashamed of yourself, he said.I wasnt 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 didnt taste the cookies. Only Moritz existed.Im 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.

Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease.

One should be good to oneself. Especially when one is alone.

One can only ask to play as well as possible the notes one is given.

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.

No matter how close people get, they never reach each other. Including us now. Even now, theres a place where each of us is alone.

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

We all try to camouflage the monotony, But it takes a lot of energy. To insist on being special all the time. When were 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.

Deep within every blind, absolute love grows a hatred toward the beloved, who now holds the only existing key to happiness

Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition.

Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.

There is a pleasant firmness of tone when one is in harmony with oneself. Even when its a weak ethic one is resonating with.

The motive for our actions doesnt lie ahead of us. Its something behind us that were trying to escape.

“When my mother didnt come back I realized that any moment could be the last. Nothing in life should simply be a passage from one place to another. Each walk should be taken as if it is the only thing you have left. You can demand something like this of yourself as an unattainable ideal. After that, you have to remind yourself about it every time youre sloppy about something. For me that means 250 times a day.”

“Maybe its wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.”