Christine

“There is something alarming about the thought of being bound to a random person. There is the certainty of having gained a travel companion, but also the sense of having been assigned some of the responsibility for their baggage.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume III

“It is my mood that chooses the words for me. I have a mood. There is a lot you can do with such a thing. It can select words from the whole lexical palette, it can call language a palette, it can give things colors, even when they have no colors. I talk to no one, but my world acquires more and more details, I pluck words from a world with many voices, from a mood that lends color, that rubs off. But lending color to things takes up space. The palette overflows with hues. Too many words pour in, the day becomes heavier, slower, comes to a halt.”
― Solvej Balle

“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

“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