Lean Your Loneliness Slowly Against Mine
by Klara Hveberg
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Lean Your Loneliness Slowly Against Mine:
“She imagines the book reviews too.. She imagines a suitable insult for her novel’s dedication.. best of all: “With this book on my nightstand, I feel less alone.” But she doesn’t even manage to finish the novel’s opening.”
“So she’s experienced all too well how love believes and trusts in everything. But can love also forgive everything? Can you be forgiven for sins you’re unable to regret? If you know with your entire being that you would do it all over again? That if you were to permit yourself a single sin here in this life, this is the sin you would choose?Can she ever hope for forgiveness? Will she ever be able to forgive herself?”
“Is it possible to love two women at the same time in such a way that the love for one of them strengthens the love for the other? Either because you love the same qualities in both women, or because of the contrasts between them?”
“In that moment, the whole world shatters for you. The dream of ever being loved.Because if the man you love with all of your heart, cannot love you, then surely no one can.”
“But paintings are like men. It’s rare that she finds one she could imagine having in the living room. And the few times this has happened, it’s been too late—the painting was already sold.”
“She’s always afraid of regretting not having tried.”
“THE WORST THING about time is that it stands still. When she doesn’t have the strength to fill it.No. The worst thing about time is that it passes. The way everything ends up being too late. There should be a deduction for the time in which you can hardly be said to be living.”
“What if the people who believe in reincarnation are right? What if everyone is continually reborn as new versions of themselves, only with a slight twist? Then maybe it might be possible to recognize the former lives you once lived, the people you have been.”
“All these stupid, practical things that cannot be postponed are a test of my patience”
“It’s actually unfair that time has only one dimension, while space has three. Why shouldn’t time be able to romp and frolic just as freely as space? If time had several dimensions, it would be able to move forward and backward simultaneously—a circular motion in which time constantly returns to the start. Then it might be possible to give yourself some good advice in critical moments the next time you passed by. But on the other hand, the world would become a lonelier place. It would be more difficult to meet each other at a given time, because several coordinates would all have to match up. It’s probably best that time continues to be one-dimensional, like a straight number line.”
“Może tak naprawdę on istnieje w wyższym wymiarze. Jeśli tak jest, to Bóg, projektowany do naszego wymiaru, mógłby wyglądać inaczej w zależności od tego, gdzie znajduje się patrzący. A różne na jego temat historie mogłyby wynikać z różnych punktów widzenia opowiadającego, mimo że pozornie sobie nawzajem przeczą. Może trzeba zebrać wszystkie elementy, by móc z nich wywnioskować jakąś większą całość.Bo to zupełnie, jakby dokonać projekcji trójwymiarowej piramidy na płaszczyznę. Dwuwymiarowa istota żyjąca na płaszczyźnie podstawy utrzymywałaby, że piramida to kwadrat. Podobna istota egzystująca na poziomie równoległym do płaszczyzny bocznej piramidy twierdziłaby, że wcale nie, bo trójkąt. Z perspektywy innych płaszczyzn trójwymiarowa figura mogłaby wyglądać jak prostokąt, równoległobok lub trapez. Dwuwymiarowe istoty nieustannie by się ze sobą kłóciły, przekonane, że obiekt, na który patrzą, nie może być równocześnie kwadratem, trójkątem, prostokątem, równoległobokiem i trapezem. Gotowe byłyby ruszyć na wojnę i bić się o swoją prawdę. Bo nie wiedziałyby, że istnieje wyższy wymiar, w którym wszystkie ich opisy okazują się równoprawne. Rzeczywistość innego rzędu, w której zawiera się świat ich własny i wiele innych światów.”
“To recognize oneself. To resemble another. To be connected.”
“As if they aren’t trying to do their best. When the real problem is that they have been doing their best for much too long. Till their body breaks down.”
“But this time, mathematics could not save her. This time, she wrote literature..”
“In her youth, Sofia had developed the notion that the highest and most noble form of love was platonic affection. Her dream for the future was a silent interdependence, where the two lovers immersed themselves in scientific study side by side.”
“MAYBE HAPPINESS LIES in immortalizing the golden moments, in bringing them out over and over, in order to bask in their glow. So that those moments never die, but instead are given eternal life. Become the very thing you look back on as your life on the day you stand on the threshold of eternity and turn to cast a last glance at yourself from that outermost perspective. Perhaps it is only then that you’ll answer the great Composer’s question about which key you walk in. That the Composer will give you the freedom to decide that your key is A major, even though it might seem that you spent most of your life walking around in A minor. If happiness is the ability to let yourself be fulfilled by the luminous moments, one day she will manage to be happy.”
“Perhaps we’ve been created with this need to take a bite of the forbidden apple? Maybe God has planted the sin within us so that we’ll be able to find him? You don’t find God until you search for him. And you don’t search for God until you need him, need his forgiveness. Perhaps the great Composer wished for his symphony to be more minor than major, that the disharmony, the wrong notes, leads to something greater. A greater harmony.Maybe it’s not only love that is like a fractal. Perhaps the universe itself has a fractal structure. That you are reborn as ever new copies of yourself, only with a slight twist. That you are given the chance to try again and again, until you find out who you really are. Until you find your true musical key. Then you’ll have reached your nirvana, the keynote where you can rest. Your true paradise. It’s magnanimous of the great Composer to give us the chance to try and fail, that we’re permitted to make the wrong choices before we find the right ones. That even the most minuscule particle of dust in the universe carries a copy of the entire universe within it. But the human heart remains the same all through the ages.”
“I am so used to people loving others more than they love me. At school, they said that I was the most gifted. But I always knew that it was an irony of fate to have been given so many gifts, only for me to feel even more intensely what I might have been to others when nobody wanted me. . . .I do not ask for much—so little—only that no other person must always stand in the way and get closer. This is the only thing I have longed for in my entire life, to be another person’s first choice. . . . Just once, let me show you what I can be when someone truly loves me. . . . Look at me closely. Am I pretty? Yes, when someone loves me, I am pretty. Otherwise, I am not. Am I good? Yes, when someone loves me, I am kindheartedness itself. Am I unselfish? Oh, I can be so selfless that any of my thoughts may dissolve into the thought of another.”
“Now she feels like an off-key note in the musical score of the universe.The point is not to play all the notes correctly, Rakel. The point is to impart the universe’s symphony.You were born to be expanded, just as the universe is expanding. Ever since you were born, you have been growing. At first, everyone can see this, but after a while it happens more subtly, and you yourself must find the things that expand you. The colors. The books. The people. Everything in the universe expands and is expanded by forces beyond itself.You were born to evolve. And you evolve most through encounters with others. And love is the only way you can truly weave yourself in and out of another person. It’s the tentacles of the fractal. It trusts and believes in everything. But it will also teach you about forgiveness.”
“SHE CAN’T SEEM to stop writing to David. She continues to write long emails to him every week. The only difference is that she no longer sends them to him. The messages from David gradually become more and more infrequent, as if he’s about to forget. David doesn’t need Rakel. He has a busy family life, with kids and a wife who love him. Why has Rakel been equipped with so much love if there’s nobody out there in need of it?Other people have a life. They forget. They don’t lie under the covers like her, collecting moments. Yet again, she’s just a tiny morsel of someone else’s life—while he’s almost her entire world. Why does she think that people love her more than they actually do? Because she loves them so much? Because love believes and trusts in everything?”
“She knows that she loves David. And that she therefore has to stop writing to him.”
“Sometimes I wonder whether my whole life has been a singular quest for beauty. Beauty in mathematics, and beauty in literature and in music. I feel that creating mathematics and writing fiction are closely related. While authors are poets in the universe of language, mathematicians seek the poetry in the language of the universe. The German mathematician Karl Weierstrass once wrote that any great mathematician must also be a poet. When I was young, several people told me that I’d be a poet when I grew up. So in a way, it feels as if I’ve tried to investigate whether the reverse implication is true: whether every poet must also be a great mathematician. I still don’t know the answer, but I doubt that this is the case.Over the past few years, I’ve started to dream of writing a novel. I’ve marveled at how the enjoyment of hearing a piece of music often gets stronger the better you know the piece, while a novel rarely has the same impact on third reading. Is it because music relies on recognition, while literature relies on the unexpected? Or has it more to do with the structure of the music, how the themes reflect each other so that the listener discovers ever new connections? The way the interplay of colors in a painting can fluctuate in different light, so that the painting continually changes? If so, it must be possible to write a novel in the same way. A novel that gets richer every time you read it, because you discover new connections that were previously invisible. A novel that carries something of the eternal beauty of music and mathematics within it.One of the most alluring things about mathematics is perhaps the feeling of being able to uncover unshakeable truths. And that terms such as truth and beauty obtain a kind of objectivity, because mathematicians have a shared understanding of what constitutes a valid proof and what is aesthetically beautiful. The disadvantage is that the truths of mathematics don’t say anything about what is true in the world beyond mathematics itself.”
“HER LETTERS GRADUALLY get longer. Writing to David is like writing to herself. Because he sees the detail in everything around him, just as she does. Because he understands what she means. She sees things more clearly when she sees them with him.”
“HOW PLEASANT DEATH must be for those who are weary of life!”
“If you don’t have friends among the living, you must seek company among the dead.”
“what does a mathematician do when her head is full of syrup? A mathematician who can’t think straight enough to do mathematics”
“Wonderful. The word she has always found far too big. Nora waited eight years too. Perhaps it wasn’t her disappointment in Helmer that was the worst, but the transition from gold to granite. That what she thought was a noble act, a sacrifice made for love, became a sin. That she was not the savior, but the one who needed saving. And perhaps the wonderful state she longed for was to one day feel free of guilt. Without shame.”
“She always had to start with a problem she was interested in solving; any theory she needed she learned along the way. She’s never been able to just sit down and read a mathematics textbook from A to Z, because she needs to see things in the right frame of reference. Context plays a role.”
“You are going to feel the need to write, but let it come when it must. Do something else first.”Is now the time for her to start writing? She’s struggling to feel any great urge. All she ever manages to get down on paper are disjointed fragments of text, almost like keywords. She can only write a couple of lines a day. Something about black holes. Gravity. Time. In search of lost time. Sofia Kovalevskaya. Stein Mehren. Wonderful.”
“She feels a kind of affection for him as he stands there, holding her gaze. She wants to smooth down his hair, comfort him like a small child.”
