Jostein Gaarder

“A joker is a little fool who is different from everyone else. He's not a club, diamond, heart, or spade. He's not an eight or a nine, a king or a jack. He is an outsider. He is placed in the same pack as the other cards, but he doesn't belong there. Therefore, he can be removed without anybody missing him.”

“Perhaps we aren’t fully developed. The physical development of human beings necessarily had to precede the psychological. Perhaps the physical nature of the universe is merely a necessary external material for its own self-awareness.”

“Our lives are part of a unique adventure... Nevertheless, most of us think the world is 'normal' and are constantly hunting for something abnormal--like angels or Martians. But that is just because we don't realize the world is a mystery. As for myself, I felt completely different. I saw the world as an amazing dream. I was hunting for some kind of explanation of how everything fit together.”

“A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.…We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick.”

“I no longer feel the need to see and sense more than I've already experienced. I just want so desperately to hang on what I have.”

“The rearing of children is considered too important to be left to the individual and should be the responsibility of the state.”

“The truth is that I feel like a ghost already, and I have to catch my breath each time I think about it. I begin to understand why ghosts go in for so much sighing and hooting. It's not to scare their descendants. It's just that they find it so hard to breathe in a time other than their own.We don't only have a place in existence. We also have an allotted span.That's the way things are, and all I can do is extrapolate from what's around me now.”

“But understanding will always require some effort. You probably wouldn't admire a friend who was good at everything if it cost her no effort.”

“Was Jesus a christian?”

“When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.”

“... perhaps the clock hands had become so tired of going in the same direction year after year that they had suddenly begun to go the opposite way instead...”

“It was all too easy to make things up, it was like skating on thin ice, it was like doing dainty pirouettes on a brittle crust over water thousands of fathoms deep.”

“All a man can see while looking at the sky are cosmic fossils of thousands and millions of years ago. The only thing an astrologer can predict, is the past.”

“A composition—and every work of art is one—is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process.”

“Where did the world come from? The question has an answer, even though I cannot get to it. It is a good question. It is like a crime that has not been solved. There is an answer, even if police do not know it.”

“But sorrow can also be contagious. Fear is different. It isn't as communicable as laughter or sadness, and a good thing too. Fear is almost entirely a lonely thing.”

“I think about my editor when I write. She's a good friend, too.”

“Wir werden alt und grau. Wir werden eines Tages verschlissen sein und aus der Welt verschwinden. Mit unseren Träumen ist das anders. Sie können in anderen Menschen weiterleben, wenn es uns schon längst, längst nicht mehr gibt.”

“I have gone around observing your activities from the outside. Because of this I have also been able to see things to which you have been blind... Every morning you have gone to work, but you have never been fully awake. Of course, you have seen the sun and the moon, the stars in the sky, and everything that moves, but you haven't really seen it at all. It is different for the Joker, because he was put into this world with a flaw: He sees too clearly and too much.”

“I want to understand more about the world while I'm still here.”