“Who can really say how decisions are made, how emotions change, how ideas arise? We talk about inspiration; about a bolt of lightnng from a clear sky, but perhaps everything is just as simple and just as infinitely complex as the processes that make a particular leaf fall at a particularmoment. That point has been reached, that's all. It has to happen, and it does happen.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Harbour
“Land and sea.
We may think of them as opposites; as complements. But there is a difference in how we think of them; the sea, and the land.
If we are walking around in a forest, a meadow or a town, we see our surroundings as being made up of individual elements. There are many different kinds of trees in varying sizes, those buildings, these streets. The meadow, the flowers, the bushes. Our gaze lingers on details, and if we are standing in a forest in the autumn, we become tongue-tied if we try to describe the richness around us. All this exists on land.
But the sea. The sea is something completely different. The sea is one.
We may note the shifting moods of the sea. What the sea looks like when the wind is blowing, how the sea plays with the light, how it rises and falls. But still it is always the sea we are talking about. We have given different parts of the sea different names for navigation and identification, but if we are standing before the sea, there is only one whole. The Sea.
If we are taken so far out in a small boat that no land is visible in any direction, we may catch sight of the sea. It is not a pleasant experience. The sea is a god, an unseeing, unhearing deity that does not even know we exist. We mean less than a grain of sand on an elephant's back, and if the sea wants us, it will take us. That's just the way it is. The sea knows no limits, makes no concessions. It has given us everything and it can take everything away from us.
To other gods we send our prayer: Protect us from the sea.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Harbour
“This wasn't the way he had expected his life to be. It worked, but that was about all. Happiness had got lost somewhere along the way.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Harbour
“A new life? There’s not such thing.
It was only in the magazine headlines that people got a new life. Stopped drinking or taking drugs, found a new love. But the same life.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Harbour
“That's what love looks like. It can happen. Two people can find one another, and then work together to sustain that amorphous, incomprehensible third party that has arisen between them. Love becomes an entity unto itself; the thing that determines how life is to be lived.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Harbour
“It was as if she lived only on clear, salty air, and when the day came for her to pass away, she would probably do exactly that. Just take a step to one side. Dissolve into a north-westerly wind as it whirled around the lighthouse at North Point, then out across the sea.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Harbour
“But love? Who can say what is just a mire of dark needs and desires, and what is true love? Does such a thing exist? Can't it be that if we say, 'I love you' to another person and know that we mean it, then that is love, regardless of the motive?”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Harbour
“When it comes to life, all you can change is the equivalent of furniture, paint and windows. Doors, maybe. Change the things that are in too bad a state and hope the core holds.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Harbour
“Att han varit rädd för GB-gubben och rabblat Alfonsramsor, att han börjat bygga med pärlor och att allt han ville var att ligga i hennes säng och läsa Bamse. Jag är så liten.
Äntligen förstod han vad det betydde:
Bär mej.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Harbour
“This time he shouted a little more loudly, and his heart began to beat a little more quickly. It was foolish, of course. There was no chance she could have got lost here.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Harbour
“Pero están atados a la tierra por una cadena invisible y solo pueden escudriñar un mar deshabitado en perpetua calma.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Harbour
“Los breves instantes en los que uno no tiene que comportarse como una persona mayor y responsable. Hay que aprovecharlos.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Harbour
“Es extraño, ¿no? Se puede vivir toda la vida con una persona. Y, sin embargo, no conocerla. No conocerla en realidad.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Harbour
John Ajvide Lindqvist
Born place: in Blackeberg, Sweden
Born date December 2, 1968
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“Memories were short and history unkind. It was the way of the world.”
― Deborah Harkness, quote from Shadow of Night
“Ezra.’ The dawn of hope in her whisper.
He nods, swallowing hard.
She pushes to her feet, swaying, and the movement seems to release him— the next moment he’s running across the shuttle bay, watched by the debrief crew in the doorway, who know better than to move a muscle.
She steps forward, one foot in front of the other, and then he reaches her, and they come together with a crash. Her arms curl up around his neck, and his mouth finds her like he’s drowning and she’s air and her feet come clean off the ground as the world is forgotten. And they’re together.”
― Amie Kaufman, quote from Illuminae
“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Giovanni's Room
“Alright. Have fun. I'm out. Text me if you need me." She leaned to whisper in my ear. "Do you remember the code for a 911 emergency date exit?"
She pulled back to look at me seriously.
"Uh, 911?"
"Good girl." She smiled at me and then at Caleb. Have fun you two!" She waved over her shoulder.”
― Shelly Crane, quote from Significance
“I never thought before, that there was a woman in the world who could affect me so much by saying so little. But don't be hard in your construction of me. You don't know what my state of mind towards you is. You don't know how you haunt and bewilder me. You don't know how the cursed carelessness that is over-officious in helping me at every other turning of my life WON'T help me here. You have struck it dead, I think, and I sometimes wish you had struck me dead along with it.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from Our Mutual Friend
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