Top 50 Carsten Jensen Quotes
#1. But I could feel resentment inside me, and I knew it would keep growing until it changed into something far more dangerous.
Carsten Jensen
#2. The miller's hefty wife, Madam Weber, already armed with a pitchfork, insisted on joining the fight, and because she appeared more intimidating than most of us men, we instantly welcomed her to our bloodthirsty ranks.
Carsten Jensen
#3. With no other choices open to us, we'd turned our gaze seaward. The oceans were our America: they reached farther than any prairie, untamed as on the first day of creation. Nobody owned them.
Carsten Jensen
#4. So you've stopped thinking you're going to die?
Oh, I'm more certain of it than ever. But I've stopped being scared.
Carsten Jensen
#5. We thought we knew everything about him. But that's not how life is. When all's said and done, we can never truly know one another.
Carsten Jensen
#6. Now I remembered a captain's honor and his only duty: to bring his crew back alive.
Carsten Jensen
#7. Two drowning people can't save each other. All they can do is drag each other down.
Carsten Jensen
#8. Though I had no respect for Jack Lewis, I respected the hole in his chest. He was dying, and you owe the dying your attention.
Carsten Jensen
#9. No, he hadn't known anything about children, but now he'd learned something: a child's mind is open to everything.
Carsten Jensen
#10. Life had taught him about something far more complicated than justice. Its name was balance.
Carsten Jensen
#11. Is there anything more heartbreaking than drowning in sight of land? Is there a single one of us who hasn't at least once felt haunted by the fear of slipping away within sight of a safe haven?
Carsten Jensen
#12. She still held back her tears, as if subjecting herself to some terrible endurance test.
Carsten Jensen
#14. The constant bombardment and the randomness with which death scythed us down had exhausted us...
Carsten Jensen
#15. There shall come a day when all the women in the world will lie in the gutter screaming for cock,' he intoned. 'But not an inch shall they be given!'
'Am I to understand,' Knud Erik asked, 'that nobody wanted to screw you?
Carsten Jensen
#16. We were familiar with the line that separates grief from madness, and we know that sometimes the only way to stay on the right side of it is to scream.
Carsten Jensen
#17. Our fathers were often away. But then sometimes, out of the blue, they'd be gone forever. Often away and gone forever: the two phrases marked the difference between having a living father and a dead one. It wasn't a big difference, but it was big enough to make us cry when no one was looking. One
Carsten Jensen
#18. They all lived so steeped in fear that the losses they had yet to suffer had already consumed them.
Carsten Jensen
#19. Your roots aren't to be found in your childhood so much as in your child. It's he who provides your link to the world, and home is wherever he is.
Carsten Jensen
#21. But he didnt want to be thought of as a fool. To walk around the town fully dressed and yet appear naked to the world was a shame he couldn't bear.
Carsten Jensen
#22. He wasn't physically impotent. So the impotence must lie in his soul. Finding oblivion in a moment's ecstasy was all he could manage.
Carsten Jensen
#23. Freedom had a thousand faces. But so did crime. The thought of what a man might do made me dizzy.
Carsten Jensen
#24. The women's song was always the same, as monotonous as the beating of the waves against the beach: loss, loss. The conch offered them no enchantment. When they put their ear to it, all they heard was the echo of their mourning.
Carsten Jensen
#25. Even terror needs a yardstick, and surely the yardstick for the unknown is the known?
Carsten Jensen
#26. There was plenty for the eye to feast on, but nothing for the soul. He had a hunger for something that no sky could satisfy. Somewhere on the planet there had to be a different kind of light.
Carsten Jensen
#27. Many years ago there lived a man called Laurids Madsen who went up to heaven and came down again thanks to his boots.
Carsten Jensen
#28. Hope can be like a plant that sprouts and grows and keeps people alive. But it can also be a wound that refuses to heal.
Carsten Jensen
#29. Everyone in our town has a story
but it's not the one he tells himself. Its author has a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, and five hundred pens that never stop scribbling.
Carsten Jensen
#30. We don't sail because the sea is there. We sail because there's a harbour. We don't start by heading for distant shores. We seek protection first.
Carsten Jensen
#31. Having a child isn't a deal you strike with life. As I said: a child is a gift. And what remains after a child is gone is the memory of the years it was allowed to live. Not its death
Carsten Jensen
#32. That's the strange thing about a good story. No pleasure if you can't share it.
Carsten Jensen
#33. Their eyes persecuted him everywhere, eventually following him all the way into the darkness around his bed and into his dreams, like a madness that threatened to overpower him.
Carsten Jensen
#34. Contrary to what most people think, weeping isn't an uncontrollable emotion that spills into tears. It's the opposite, a channel for feelings, a way to divert them in a healthy direction.
Carsten Jensen
#35. War was like sailing. You could learn about clouds, wind direction, and currents, but the sea remained forever unpredictable. All you could do was adapt to it and try to return home alive.
Carsten Jensen
#36. Without discussing it with his mother, Anton went up to his teacher, Miss Katballe, and informed her that after seven years he was now quitting school. It was the best day of her life, she replied. With unexpected politeness he bowed, thanked her, and said, likewise.
Carsten Jensen
#37. They were probably scared of him and so they did what boys do around any object of fear: they went up close, pointed a finger, gave it a nickname, and masked their terror with roaring laughter.
Carsten Jensen
#39. That's how we're connected: through the hurt we inflict on one another.
Carsten Jensen
#41. Yes, he was a rock she could cling to. But he was also a rock she could smash herself to pieces against.
Carsten Jensen
#43. That's how it is, he told himself. If you dread something enough, even your worst fears coming true brings comfort.
Carsten Jensen
#44. As long as our voiced were in harmony, it didn't matter that our accents were at war.
Carsten Jensen
#45. But that's how it is on a sailing ship, and in this respect its journey parallels that of life: simply knowing where you want to go isn't enough, because life is a windblown voyage, consisting mainly of the detours imposed by alternating calm and storm.
Carsten Jensen
#46. Her grief was a burden so heavy, he came close to collapsing under it, and yet he couldn't lay it down.
Carsten Jensen
#47. What was he thinking about? He was old, but he hasn't found peace.
Had he realized that a long life didn't automatically bestow wisdom?
Carsten Jensen
#48. To Ejinar that cannonball was a monster with a will of its own. It showed him what war was: not a battery that exploded and sent matchstick soldiers fleeing, but a dragon that breathed hot fire on his naked heart.
Carsten Jensen
#49. Perhaps the greatest thing you can achieve is to love without demanding anything in return.
Carsten Jensen
#50. Look at the swell. You'll not find a bigger swell anywhere. It has half the globe for its run-up. You're young. You have the whole world. Don't bother yourself with the past.
Carsten Jensen
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