Peter Hoeg Quotes

#1. 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.

Peter Hoeg

#2. 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 Hoeg

#3. 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 Hoeg

#4. 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 Hoeg

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

Peter Hoeg

#6. 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 Hoeg

#7. The greatest performances where when fingertips took away a very thin veil between people and uncovered the universe in its entirety.

Peter Hoeg

#8. There's a plan the school ... So many things happen, you're never given any explanation. We are going to study it scientifically, like in a laboratory.

Peter Hoeg

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

Peter Hoeg

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

Peter Hoeg

#11. I'm not crying about anything or anyone in particular. The life I live I created for myself, and I wouldn't want it any different. I cry because in the universe there is something as beautiful as Kremer playing the Brains violin concerto.

Peter Hoeg

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

Peter Hoeg

#13. 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.

Peter Hoeg

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

Peter Hoeg

#15. We who are profoundly joined in soul can only but heal the ruptures of the cosmos.

Peter Hoeg

#16. The child had wanted attention. She had just asked to be noticed. But she was given an assessment. 'What a clever girl!

Peter Hoeg

#17. 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 Hoeg

#18. 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 Hoeg

#19. To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost.

Peter Hoeg

#20. Confronted with people who have power, and who enjoy using it, I turn into a different person, a baser and meaner one.

Peter Hoeg

#21. And yet, quite often, she comes to me. Seldom to have anything explained, but often to tell me something.
When she comes over to me, I sit down on the floor. It does not seem right to tower over her when she is talking to me. Instead I sit down, then our heads are on a level.

Peter Hoeg

#22. The motive for our actions doesn't lie ahead of us. It's something behind us that we're trying to escape.

Peter Hoeg

#23. Even then one sensed that it must be a rule. That time could not be something that passed all by itself but was something one had to hold one to. And that, when one let go of it, that moment was very significant.

Peter Hoeg

#24. It's the kind of day that might make you wonder about the meaning of life, and discover that there is none.

Peter Hoeg

#25. The problem with anger against God is that it's impossible to go higher in the system to complain.

Peter Hoeg

#26. When you let your mind go blank,' he said, 'or when you stop talking for a long time, something happens. Time becomes different. It goes away. It doesn't come back until you start to say something.

Peter Hoeg

#27. Under certain circumstances the fateful decisions in life, sometimes even in matters of life and death, are made with an almost indifferent ease. While the little things-for instance, the way people hang on to what is over-seem so important.

Peter Hoeg

#28. If you want to support others you have to stay upright yourself.

Peter Hoeg

#29. There's nothing under the sun as grotesque as cold European courtesy manifested in the third and fourth worlds.

Peter Hoeg

#30. Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions.

Peter Hoeg

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

Peter Hoeg

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

Peter Hoeg

#33. When you're young, you think that sex is the culmination of intimacy. Later you discover that it's barely the beginning.

Peter Hoeg

#34. The flakes are the size of tiny feathers, and that's the way snow is, it's not necessarily cold.

Peter Hoeg

#35. 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.

Peter Hoeg

#36. In ten years they would be dead, deported or in leadership positions.

Peter Hoeg

#37. You spend your whole life believing that you will always be on the outside or on the borderline. You struggle and struggle, and yet it all seems to be in vain. And then, suddenly, you are allowed inside and lifted up into the light.

Peter Hoeg

#38. 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.

Peter Hoeg

#39. I've always enjoyed cleaning. Even though they tried to teach us laziness in school.

Peter Hoeg

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

Peter Hoeg

#41. No one who has lived side by side with animals that have plenty of room can ever visit the zoo.

Peter Hoeg

#42. That was the way of the rule. They had so many to keep an eye on. As long as you kept a low profile, in time you would be forgotten. It was the best thing that could happen.

Peter Hoeg

#43. We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror.

Peter Hoeg

#44. It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly.

Peter Hoeg

#45. 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.

Peter Hoeg

#46. Reading snow is like listening to music. To describe what you've read is like explaining music in writing.

Peter Hoeg

#47. Even the raven started out in human form, and he fumbled blindly, and his actions were haphazard until it was revealed to him who he was and what his purpose was.

Peter Hoeg

#48. 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 Hoeg

#49. 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

Peter Hoeg

#50. 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 Hoeg

#51. Some thoughts have glue on them.----Smilla

Peter Hoeg

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

Peter Hoeg

#53. It's these small differences in people's karma that determine if we get up or remain lying on the ground.

Peter Hoeg

#54. People under thirty haven't yet stopped believing that something wonderful can suddenly happen.

Peter Hoeg

#55. 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 Hoeg

#56. Grief is a gift, something you have to earn.

Peter Hoeg

#57. 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 Hoeg

#58. Some girls are fortunate enough to be in love with deep and intelligent boys," she says. "And then there's the rest of us, who have to make do.

Peter Hoeg

#59. It's a phenomenon that I've often observed without understanding it. Inside someone another person can exist, a fully formed, generous, and trustworthy individual who never comes to light except in glimpses, because he is surrounded by a corrupt, dyed-in-the-wool, repeat offender.

Peter Hoeg

#60. 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 Hoeg

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

Peter Hoeg

#62. 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 Hoeg

#63. Back then I could not understand one word of what I read.
Reading did, however, give me heart. Even if you cannot understand what you are reading you can get something from books.

Peter Hoeg

#64. The body's pain is so paper-thin and insignificant compared to that of the mind.

Peter Hoeg

#65. We sat there and I knew that this was how it felt to be totally accepted. You sit close to another person and are understood, everything is understood and nothing is judged and you are indispensable.

Peter Hoeg

#66. There's a look of mischief in his eyes. 'Smilla. Why is it that such an elegant and petite girl like you has such a rough voice.'
I'm sorry,' I say, 'if I give you the impression that it is only my mouth that's rough. I do my best to be rough all over.

Peter Hoeg

#67. Never do I close my door behind me without being conscious that I am carrying out an act of charity towards myself.

Peter Hoeg

#68. I like him. I have a weakness for losers. Invalids, foreigners, the fat boy of the class, the ones nobody ever wants to dance with. My heart beats for them. Maybe because I've always known that in some way I will forever be one of them.

Peter Hoeg

#69. 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.

Peter Hoeg

#70. I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.

Peter Hoeg

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

Peter Hoeg

#72. 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.

Peter Hoeg

#73. On closer examination, we are simply a banal tragedy spread over two generations.

Peter Hoeg

#74. Maybe a person can be born to the wrong people," he said. "Maybe a person should have been put somewhere else.

Peter Hoeg

#75. 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 Hoeg

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

Peter Hoeg

#77. When you are in the company of people who look down upon themselves as though they were animals, you too become like an animal. Or worse, because animals do not despise themselves.

Peter Hoeg

#78. April light was unlike any other. It had a charming, optimistic unreliability like an overbid hand in poker. It gave a promise of spring that it wasn't sure it could keep.

Peter Hoeg

#79. Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition.

Peter Hoeg

#80. She was transparent, like a watercolor. As if she were about to dissolve in sound, in tones not yet created.

Peter Hoeg

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

Peter Hoeg

#82. SheAlmighty had tuned each person in a musical key, and Kasper could hear it. Best in the brief, unguarded moments when people were nearby but didn't yet know he was listening. So he waited by the window, as he was doing now.

Peter Hoeg

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

Peter Hoeg