“It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly.”

“Those who were on the inside, the majority that is, for them it had been hard to get his point, mostly they were just pleased that they were on the inside, that they were the fittest.For those on the outside, the fear and abandonment amounts to almost everything; everybody knows that.Understanding is something one does best when one is on the borderline.”

“When you assess something, you are forced to assume that a linear scale of values can be applied to it. Otherwise no assessment is possible. Every person who says of something that it is good or bad or a bit better than yesterday is declaring that a points system exists; that you can, in a reasonably clear and obvious fashion, set some sort of a number against an achievement.But never at any time has a code of practice been laid down for the awarding of points. No offense intended to anyone. Never at any time in the history of the world has anyone—for anything ever so slightly more complicated than the straightforward play of a ball or a 400-meter race—been able to come up with a code of practice that could be learned and followed by several different people, in such a way that they would all arrive at the same mark. Never at any time have they been able to agree on a method for determining when one drawing, one meal, one sentence, one insult, the picking of one lock, one blow, one patriotic song, one Danish essay, one playground, one frog, or one interview is good or bad or better or worse than another.”

“..That's where we humans make a mistake. We don't see the utterly amazing when it comes to us disguised as the ordinary.”

“When my mother didn't come back I realized that any moment could be the last. Nothing in life should simply be a passage from one place to another. Each walk should be taken as if it is the only thing you have left. You can demand something like this of yourself as an unattainable ideal. After that, you have to remind yourself about it every time you're sloppy about something. For me that means 250 times a day.”

“There's no simple aritmetic for life's distribution of happiness and sorrow, no such thing as a standard share.”

“Confronted with people who have power, and who enjoy using it, I turn into a different person, a baser and meaner one.”