Per Petterson > Quotes

“You decide for yourself when it will hurt.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know _about_ you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook. No-one can touch you unless you yourself want them to.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“But that's life. That's what you learn from; when things happen. Especially at your age. You just have to take it in and remember to think afterwards and not forget and never grow bitter.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“...and we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“Time is important to me now, I tell myself.Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but only be time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by. so that it grows distict to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“...when it came to dying, I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore really nothing to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember.”
― Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time

“I remember a lot of dreams. Sometimes they are hard to distinguish from what has really happened. That is not so terrible. It is the same with books.”
― Per Petterson, In the Wake

“All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this. Even when everything was going well, as it often did. I can say that much. That it often did. I have been lucky. But even then, for instance in the middle of an embrace and someone whispering words in my ear I wanted to hear, I could suddenly get a longing to be in a place where there was only silence. Years might go by and I did not think about it, but that does not mean that I did not long to be there. And now I am here, and it is almost exactly as I had imagined it.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you're reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again. A consolation, maybe, or a protest against a world gone off the rails, but it is not like that any more, my world is not like that, and I have never gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate. They whine, they wash their hands and crave pity. I believe we shape our lives ourselves, at any rate I have shaped mine, for what it's worth, and I take complete responsibility. But of all the places I might have moved to, I had to land up precisely here.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“One of my many horrors is to become the man with the frayed jacket and unfastened flies standing at the Co-op counter with egg on his shirt and more too because the mirror in the hall has given up the ghost. A shipwrecked man without an anchor in the world except in his own liquid thoughts where time has lost its sequence.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it....”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“...you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember.”
― Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time

“I was perfectly calm, I was the anchor of the world.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“A dead dog is more quiet than a house on the steppes, a chair in a empty room.”
― Per Petterson, Jeg forbanner tidens elv

“I'm sorry I laughed...I know it isn't funny for you. It was incredibly stupid of me to laugh. Does it hurt a lot anywhere?
'Not really,' I said.
'Only a bit in your soul?'
'Maybe a bit.'
'Let it sink,' he said. 'Just leave it. You can't use it for anything.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“But I was not quite with him in my thoughts, and I wonder whether that is how we got to be after living alone for a long time, that in the middle of a train of thought we start talking outloud, that the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversations we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one form the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line. Is this how my future looks?”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“She looks at me, this is not what she had expected, she sniffs at the food and only slowly starts to eat, swallows each mouthful with demonstrative gloom, and then turns to look at me again, a long look, with those eyes, sighs and goes on, as if she were emptying the poisoned chalice. Spoiled dog.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“...I see the shape of the wind on the water...”
― Per Petterson, In the Wake

“But what I found out that summer . . . was that I could swallow whatever hit me and let it sink as if nothing had happened. So I mimicked a game that meant nothing to me now, I was going through the motions, and then it looked as if what I was doing had a purpose, but it did not.”
― Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time

“Time is important to me now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but be only time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by, so that it grows distinct to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“What I liked was the train ride. It took an hour and that was enough for me to be able to lean backwards against the seat with closed eyes, feel the joints in the rails come up and thump through my body and sometimes peer out of the windows and see windswept heathland and imagine I was on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I had read about it, seen pictures in a book and decided that no matter when and how life would turn out, one day I would travel from Moscow to Vladivostok on that train, and I practised saying the names: Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, they were difficult to pronounce with all their hard consonants, but ever since the trip to Skagen, every journey I made by train was a potential departure on my own great journey.”
― Per Petterson, To Siberia

“There is nothing I need from the shop, and this is not the day for social profligacy.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“It was as if gravity was suspended. It was like dancing, I thought, although I had never danced in my whole life. We were never to walk like that again.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“Then she turns to me. 'Tell me. How are you really?' she says, as if there were two versions of my life, and now she is not on the verge of tears at all, but sharp-voiced as an interrogator.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“Да си призная, нямам нищо против лицето в огледалото. Честно, разпознавам се. Няма какво повече да искам.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“...I thought about how it must feel to lose your life so early. Lose your life, as if you held an egg in your hand, and then dropped it, and it fell to the ground and broke, and I knew it could not feel like anything at all. If you were dead, you were dead, but in the fraction of a second just before; whether you realized then it was the end, and what that felt like. There was a narrow opening there, like a door barely ajar, that I pushed towards, because I wanted to get in, and there was a golden light in that crack that came from the sunlight on my eyelids, and then suddenly I slipped inside, and I was certainly there for a little flash, and it did not frighten me at all, just made me sad and astonished at how quiet everything was.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“But life had shifted its weight from one point to another, from one leg to the other, like a silent giant in the vast shadows against the ridge, and I did not feel like the person I had been when this day began, and I did not even know if that was something to be sorry for.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“She turns her head and looks at me, and there is a trustfuless in that look I probably do not deserve. But maybe that is not the point, to deserve it or not, perhaps it just exists, that trust, disconnected from who you are and what you have done, and is not to be measured in any way.”
― Per Petterson

“Oh, well, we did have a good day out together, you and I, that doesn't happen every day, does it?”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“[H]alf blinded you embraced your own body, and with the warmth still under your jacket, you walked up the pavement along the square, moving through the grey light, and let your thoughts seep softly in, undisturbed, on the way up to the station, but also walking as one of many in the chill of December. I liked the feeling being a we, being more than myself, being larger than myself, being surrounded by others in a way I had never experienced before, of belonging, and it made no difference if those who walked to the left or the right of me, in front or behind me on this street, did not share the same feeling.”
― Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time