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1 " 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 , Smilla's Sense of Snow
2 " 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. "
3 " We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror. "
4 " On closer examination, we are simply a banal tragedy spread over two generations. "
5 " 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. "
6 " There's a widespread notion that children are open, that the truth about their inner selves just seeps out of them. That's all wrong. No one is more covert than a child, and no one has greater cause to be that way. It's a response to a world that is always using a tin-opener on them to see what they have inside, just in case it ought to be replaced with a more useful type of tinned foodstuff. "
7 " When people talk about how fast children forget, how fast they forgive, how sensitive they are, I let it go in one ear and out the other. Children can remember and forget and totally freeze to death the people they don't like. "
8 " 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. "
9 " 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. "
10 " 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. "
11 " To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost. "
12 " 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. "
13 " Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease. "
14 " 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. "
15 " Deep within every blind, absolute love grows a hatred toward the beloved, who now holds the only existing key to happiness "
16 " Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition. "
17 " Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something. "
18 " I sit there in total silence. It's always interesting to leave Europeans in silence. For them it's a vacuum in which the tension grows and converges toward the intolerable. "
19 " В чем-то лед такой понятный — вся его история запечатлена на поверхности. Торосы, глыбы, тающий и снова замерзающий лед. Мозаичная смесь льда различных возрастов, большие куски sikussaq — старого льда, созданного в защищенных фьордах, со временем оторвавшегося и выдавленного в море. Теперь из тех облаков, за которые нырнуло солнце, в последних солнечных лучах опускается на землю тонкая пелена qanik — медленно падающего снега.Между белой поверхностью и моим сердцем протянута нить. Словно это продолжение солевого дерева внутри льда. "
20 " В первый раз это сродни тому чувству, которое возникает, когда обнаруживаешь, что ты не спишь, в то время как все вокруг спят. В равной мере одиночество и всемогущество. "
