sound, love, religion, and clowns

Peter Høeg, The Quiet Girl
translated by Nadia Christensen

When one is sixty-five and falls in love it must be the same as when one was fifteen.

The good thing about having reached the bottom is that you can't fall any farther.

Alcohol is a violin; it's impossible to leave it alone.

If one could attach electrodes and draw energy directly from children, one could make a fortune.

Happiness doesn't consist so much of what one has scraped together and gotten off the ground, but of what one has been able to let go of.

The Divine is partial to saunas.

One can't pray for something. At least not for different musical notes. One can only ask to play as well as possible the notes one is given.

In periods of depression it is important to hold on to one's healthy leisure-time interests.

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

When people make promises it's always with only a percentage of themselves... There is never more than 10 percent of the total persona behind the golden promises, because that is as much of ourselves as we control.

Night is not a time of day, night is not an intensity of light; night is a sound.

Do we ever hear anything other than our own monstrous ego and the immense filter of our personality?

It's unfortunate. To be forty-two. And the only way out is still to call your father.

It may well be that liquor doesn't work as deeply as heartfelt prayer. But it works just as quickly.

Part of the secret of love is concentration and setting voluntary limits.

Hell: it's not a place. Hell is transportable. All of us carry it around with us. It opens up and stays with us from the moment we lose contact with our own natural sympathy.

There are many people who believe they have bought a ticket to Gilbert and Sullivan in this life. And only when it's almost too late do they discover that existence is a piece of doomsday music by Schnittke instead.

God hears everything. But He doesn't testify in municipal court.

Evil is not necessary; it's a tumor; it can be removed.

No matter how close people get, they never reach each other.

Femininity is an ocean; even if one has both a life jacket and a preserver, the risk of drowning is overwhelming.

When you have reached the age of forty-two, you live an ever greater part of your life in memories.

True freedom is freedom from having to choose, because everything is perfect just as it is.

The con man in each of us adores the Internet. But to go from there to the point of abandoning natural dignity to acquaint oneself with how a computer works is still quite a leap.

Every man who shaves wishes a woman would watch and evaluate the result.

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.

A great egotist is a great sinner. Great sinners have the opportunity for great remorse. Remorse is a springboard.

Half of all anger is directed inward at oneself.

Perhaps each of us is not just one person but an endless series of unique constellations in the present.

Forgiveness isn't charged with emotion; it's a matter of sound common sense. It occurs when you realize that the other person could not have acted otherwise. And that you could not have acted differently either. Very few of us have a real choice in decisive situations.

Prayer is a raft that ferries us safely through divorces, through drunken sprees, psychedelic mushroom trips, grade-three interrogations, and even through death, they say. Prayer and love.

Reality is created by compromises. That's what human beings can tolerate.

Without training in the ring, without five thousand nights with two thousand people who don't give up at the doors, it's hard to have the last word with a clown.

If you are driving 250 miles an hour with SheAlmighty and you grab hold of roadside trees to pick fruit, there's a considerable likelihood that your arm will be torn off.

and they don't always fall apart

Glory (to Willow): You know what they used to do to witches? Crucify 'em.
Buffy: They used to bow down to gods. Things change.
-Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Five, "Tough Love"

sick sad world

The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.

Humanity is so adaptable... Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale