Solvej Balle > Quotes

“It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“The fog had lifted. Those strange days were past. I knew I couldn’t hold onto the morning’s hazy gray light for long, I knew that I had been keeping the past and the present out, that I had been like a human pilot light. Gone were the featureless mornings. Gone, my time at the bottom of the sea, gone and irretrievable. Gone, the fog which had been the greatest bliss but which—it seems to me now—requires one to be in a state of the utmost naivety, to dwell in the halls of folly, to surrender to the gentle grip of apathy.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“Maybe we are a weather system—condensation and evaporation: we are together, we look at one another, we touch one another, we condense, we come together, we make love, we fall asleep, we wake and revert to our strange bond, a quiet weather system with no natural disasters.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility. That time stands still. That gravity is suspended. That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“Often, we would simply come to the conclusion that you cannot know everything, that you have to accept some displacement in life, that you have to expect inconsistencies, and that was what we encountered: patterns and inconsistencies, two worlds trying to merge.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“I have not found a way out of the eighteenth of November, but I have found roads and paths through the day, narrow passages and tunnels I can move along. I cannot get out, but I can find ways in.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“They had an air of peace about them, Marie and Philip, which reminded me of the time, five years ago, when I first met Thomas. The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other - the one person who makes everything simple - a feeling of being calmed and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“Recalling the way I felt last night, that sense of change and hope, and then my dismay at the rude reversion to the same lopsided moon, I cannot help but feel that the world’s been pulling my leg. That not only was I mistaken, but that I had fallen for an April Fool’s prank. As if the moon had altered its appearance just long enough for me to imagine that there really was a difference, only then to act all innocent just hanging there in the sky, totally deadpan.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“My morning started in the same way as before. I became aware of the room around me, a day unfolding; I could still hold onto the feeling of a gray, misty morning for a few notes of birdsong, four or five notes, later only three, maybe two, no more, then my moment splintered and I remembered everything, my thoughts were already scanning the room, they had drifted to the windowsill, out into the morning, to the birds in the tree, to houses and streets where, one after another, people were entering the eighteenth of November in a firmly established pattern, convinced that they were embarking on this day for the very first time.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“I have exchanged my hope for a mood and a frying pan.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“time is not a circle and it is not a line, it is not a wheel and it is not”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume II

“seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“I had to be careful, I told myself. I already know that I leave a mark. I consume the world. I sustain burns and sprained ankles. But I also put other people in danger. I drag them out of their eighteenth of November. Out of their routine…. I have to be careful. I am a danger to my surroundings.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume II

“It was one thing for me to have encountered a fracture in the normal progression of time,”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“Katselen ympärilleni, ja koko ajan on jotain löydettävää. Se ei lopu. Sitä poimii ja poimii, ja kohta kun polku kääntyy, löytyy lisää.”
― Solvej Balle, Om udregning af rumfang III

“Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“simply because the summer has been on the cool side. As a meteorologist one is almost expected to deliver particular weather conditions at particular times of year, she said. A proper summer. A proper winter. As if you hadn’t done your job until you had delivered a certain sort of weather. Aren’t we going to have a winter this year? As if the seasons were a concept of sorts that we dragged around with us. From childhood perhaps, she said, with winter snow and summer sun. Or perhaps not even that. Perhaps the human seasons really only existed in films or in our photo albums. Especially if you have children. She did it herself: took pictures of typical seasons. She had noticed that she took more pictures when the seasons lived up to our expectations of them: pictures of snow in winter and bright sunshine in summer, a hot day on the beach, red and yellow leaves and a child in rain boots in autumn—and always snaps with sandals in summer, even in summers when most days were rain boot days. As if we had templates for the seasons and when everything fits we take a picture. As if it is an event in itself that the weather has got it right.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume II

“My morning acquired depth and a clear horizon. I didn’t want a horizon, though. I wanted gray morning light and a day that began with no time, no memory and no plans, but that was no longer possible.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“I am living in a time that eats up the world.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“There was a clarity to the air and instead of a vague awareness of the bed linens, the room and the soft morning light, these things were now the elements of the eighteenth of November, the day’s sharp-edged props. Thomas, lying next to me, was no longer my sleeping husband on some indeterminate morning, but my husband moving away, day by day, my not yet lost love, whose look of surprise I was about to meet, because this was no ordinary morning and I was no longer Tara, half-asleep, nebulously alive and quietly happy, but Tara back in a broken time and yet again I had to explain to Thomas what had happened. I would see his disquiet and hasten to say that he didn’t have to worry, that I was here, that we were together, no one had died, no one had been hurt. I was home, I was all right, we were alive; it was only time that had fallen apart.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“traditions don’t need to harmonize”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume II

“I have not found a way out of the eighteenth of November”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“I am sitting at a table with a pile of paper in front of me on which I have written that it is the eighteenth of November and that my name is Tara Selter. I feel as if I am no longer alone. As if someone is listening. My days have not been lost to oblivion. They exist. My days exist in my pile of paper, they have not been erased during the night, the paper remembers and on it I can see that it says day number this and day number that and the eighteenth of November but never the nineteenth.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“Det er som regel jeg som kjører bilen, som vi låner i et drivhus i nærheten. Jeg hadde kommet på at Sonia en gang hadde sagt at mennesker som ikke likte å kjøre bil, ikke ønsket å ta ansvar for tilværelsen sin.”
― Solvej Balle, Om udregning af rumfang VI

“Like waking to something that hasn’t quite taken shape and feeling, for a few moments, that everything is the same as always. Like mornings in strange rooms when you think you have woken up in your own bed, until you realize that the door is in the wrong place, the bed linens are unfamiliar, the room is different. Or like the mornings of childhood that present themselves as perfectly ordinary days, but then turn out to be Christmas Day or a birthday.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“That is how the days began: with an undefined morning. There is the grey light from the window. There is the birdsong, the sound of rain. There is the feel of the bed linen against my skin, the faint sound of the wind in the trees, a soft sighing in the morning air.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“It seems so odd to me now”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“Ah”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume II