Peter Høeg Quotes

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
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 Høeg
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 Høeg
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 Høeg
Maybe it's 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.
Peter Høeg
When my mother didn't 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 you're sloppy about something. For me that means 250 times a day.
Peter Høeg