Best 22 quotes of Carsten Jensen on MyQuotes

That's the strange thing about a good story. No pleasure if you can't share it.

Two drowning people can't save each other. All they can do is drag each other down.

With no other choices open to us, we'd turned our gaze seaward. The oceans were our America: they reached farther than any prairie, untamed as on the first day of creation. Nobody owned them.

An unused conscience is no conscience at all.

Being Danish, all you have is your supple grip and your light touch. There are plenty of places in the world where the guest who extends a weaponless hand is the most welcome. A man from a small and weak country is as good as stateless. Just wave your Danish flag. They won't see a white cross against a red background as a crusading banner; they'll just see it as a white cloth. So wrap yourself in its innocence, lao-yeh.

But that's how it is on a sailing ship, and in this respect its journey parallels that of life: simply knowing where you want to go isn't enough, because life is a windblown voyage, consisting mainly of the detours imposed by alternating calm and storm.

Everyone in our town has a story--but it's not the one he tells himself. Its author has a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, and five hundred pens that never stop scribbling.

Her grief was a burden so heavy, he came close to collapsing under it, and yet he couldn't lay it down.

Is there anything more heartbreaking than drowning in sight of land? Is there a single one of us who hasn't at least once felt haunted by the fear of slipping away within sight of a safe haven?

Look at the swell. You'll not find a bigger swell anywhere. It has half the globe for its run-up. You're young. You have the whole world. Don't bother yourself with the past.

Loss was a night that never ended.

Many years ago there lived a man called Laurids Madsen who went up to heaven and came down again thanks to his boots.

No, Captain Madsen, you don't regret having had a child simply because you lose it. Having a child isn't a deal you strike with life. As I said: a child is a gift. And what remains after a child is gone is the memory of the years it was allowed to live. Not its death.

Novels are about exploring unexplored territory in the human experience or, at least, drawing new maps of old lands.

Now I remembered a captain's honor and his only duty: to bring his crew back alive.

She still held back her tears, as if subjecting herself to some terrible endurance test.

Take the sailor," he said. "he signs on to a new ship. He's surrounded by nothing but strangers. Not only do they come from other towns and parts of his own country, but often from completely different nations. He has to learn to work with them. His vocabulary's broadened, he learns new words and grammar, and he comes across new ways of thinking. he turns into a different man, unlike the one who spends his life plowing the same old furrow. These are the men the world needs, not nationalists and warmongers.

Their eyes persecuted him everywhere, eventually following him all the way into the darkness around his bed and into his dreams, like a madness that threatened to overpower him.

The stares that had haunted and followed the terrifying killer everywhere he turned had been nothing but a boy's imitation of a mother's reproachful look. No, Herman would never guess what had driven him out of town. We hadn't accused him of a man's murder. We'd accused him of a seagull's.

We were familiar with the line that separates grief from madness, and we know that sometimes the only way to stay on the right side of it is to scream.

Without discussing it with his mother, Anton went up to his teacher, Miss Katballe, and informed her that after seven years he was now quitting school. It was the best day of her life, she replied. With unexpected politeness he bowed, thanked her, and said, likewise.

Your roots aren’t to be found in your childhood so much as in your child. It’s he who provides your link to the world, and home is wherever he is.