Sten Nadolny Quotes

Es gibt zwei Sorten von Männern. Die einen verstehen 'etwas von Frauen', die anderen sind solche, die einfach 'Frauen verstehen'.

The world is full of important ideas, but I'll follow my own mind.

There are two varieties of men. Some understand 'some women', the others are those who simply 'understand women'.

'History is intercourse with greatness and duration. It allows us to rise above time.' ...that was tempting. But he couldn't earn any money with it.

Now everything would be different; a little today, all of it tomorrow.

He now understood navigation. He had started with Gower's Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Navigation. ...The book itself was the ocean; when he closed it he could cover up deep water. He had read Moore's Practical Navigator and had tried Euclid. He found arithmetic easy, because nobody pushed him.

If he could just stay there and gaze upon the land like a stone, whole centuries long, while grassy plains became forests and swamps turned into villages or tilled land. ...He'd be recognized as human only when he stirred.

He didn't want to learn another thing. Motionless, he constantly stared at the same spot, unseeing. He breathed as if the air were loam. ...he no longer wanted to be quick. ...he wanted to slow down until he died. ...Outside the passage of time... until they'd think him dead. ...The alterations of day and night would finally become just a flickering... John sucked in the air and held his breath. ...everything would be as it had been before his birth. He would have never been.

If there had been no war, perhaps I would have already discovered a lot by now.

In the study of history, slowness is an advantage. The scholar decelerates the fast-moving events of past days until his mind can fathom them. Then... he can demonstrate to the rashest king how he should have acted in battle.

Someday he'd be quicker... to be like the sun, which only seems to wander slowly across the sky, yet whose rays are as quick as the blink of an eye. ...they reach in one instant the most distant mountains.

John always went over the time limit and then answered one or two earlier questions unexpectedly, out of order, for nothing could prevent him from solving a problem, even if it had already become inappropriate.

The spirit of history can't be caught in pictures. ...History, seriously pursued, belongs in the realm of uncertainty. A picture is a certainty.

Present and past—what had Dr. Orme said about that? The light was most fully in the present when, flaring up, it met John's eye directly. Whatever else he saw must have been lit up before and now shone only within his own eye—a light of the past.

How did Tom get there? Again, a piece of time had dropped out.