The Orange Girl Quotes

The truth is that I feel like a ghost already, and I have to catch my breath each time I think about it. I begin to understand why ghosts go in for so much sighing and hooting. It's not to scare their descendants. It's just that they find it so hard to breathe in a time other than their own.We don't only have a place in existence. We also have an allotted span.That's the way things are, and all I can do is extrapolate from what's around me now.

Jostein Gaarder

I no longer feel the need to see and sense more than I've already experienced. I just want so desperately to hang on what I have.

Jostein Gaarder

She sent me a sunny smile, and what a smile, George; it was a smile that could have melted the whole world, because if the whole world had seen it, it would have had the power to stop all wars and hatred on the face of the planet, or at lease there would have been some long ceasefires.

Jostein Gaarder

She was a stranger. She came from a more beautiful fairytale than ours. But she’d managed to find her way into our reality, perhaps because she was here to save us from what people sometimes call ‘the monotony of life.’ Until that moment I’d been completely ignorant of such missionary work. I’d thoughts there was only two types people at least. There was the Orange Girl, and there were the rest of us.

Jostein Gaarder

Although I've always been easily led by my imagination, I was, and I remain, a rational person.

Jostein Gaarder

I've nothing against eye make-up and lipstick. But the fact is we're actually living on a planet in space. For me that's an extraordinary thought. It's mind-boggling just to think about the existence of space at all. But there are girls who can't see the universe for eye-liner. And there are probably boys whose eyes are never raised above the horizon because of football. There can be quite a chasm between a small make-up mirror and a proper mirror telescope! I think it's what they call a 'matter of perspective'. Perhaps it could also be called an 'eye-opener' as well. It's never too late to experience an eye-opener. But many people live their entire lives without realizing that they're floating through empty space.There's too much going on down here. It's hard enough thinking about your looks.We belong on this earth. I'm not trying to dispute it. We're part of nature's life on this planet. Monkeys and reptiles have shown us how we breed, and I have no quarrel with that. In different natural surroundings everything might have been very different, but here we are. And I repeat: I'm not denying it. I just don't think that prevent us from trying to see a little beyond the ends of our noses.

Jostein Gaarder

But if two people do almost nothing except search for one another, it's hardly surprising if they run across each other by chance.

Jostein Gaarder

The of sitting a telescope in space was obviously not to get closer to the stars and planets the telescope was to study. That would have been about as daft as standing on tip-toe to get a better picture of the craters on the moon. The whole idea of a space telescope is to study space from a point outside the earth' atmosphere that gives that impression, in roughly the same way the ripping surface of a lake can give the impression that the stones beneath are wavy and indistinct. Or the reverse: from the bottom of a swimming pool it's not easy to see what's happening above the surface.

Jostein Gaarder

But what is a person, George? How much is a person worth? Are we nothing but dust that is whipped up and spread to the winds?

Jostein Gaarder

We are the universe.

Jostein Gaarder

Perhaps we aren’t fully developed. The physical development of human beings necessarily had to precede the psychological. Perhaps the physical nature of the universe is merely a necessary external material for its own self-awareness.

Jostein Gaarder

Look at the world, Georg, look at the world before you've filled yourself with too much physics and chemistry.

Jostein Gaarder

But sorrow can also be contagious. Fear is different. It isn't as communicable as laughter or sadness, and a good thing too. Fear is almost entirely a lonely thing.

Jostein Gaarder

I can wait until my heart bleeds with sorrow.

Jostein Gaarder