Per Petterson Quotes
I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.
Quotes to Explore
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I'm used to very low-budget situations. In 'The Exploding Girl,' we were literally changing in Starbucks because we didn't have trailers.
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I see my role as a scholar announcing that women's feelings of unworthiness and insecurity often may be traced to training in a male-oriented religion, and I'm trying to investigate a richer spiritual life for both sexes.
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Help the man-in-the-street make sense of the bewildering.
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I prefer drama; I think character-driven drama is my favorite kind of stuff to go watch, and I like being challenged by that kind of stuff in that way.
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I don't see divorce as a failure. I see it as the end to a story. In a story, everything has an end and a beginning.
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My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
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In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.
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I'm lucky that I have my family, I'm lucky that my parents are still together. Those are the things that I cherish.
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I'm lucky enough to do what I like for work - not everyone's that fortunate.
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The train's always full of football fans going up to see matches. Oh, they make sure I hear their points of view all right. They all want to have their say about their team, and make their opinions known.
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As the facts change, change your thesis. Don't be a stubborn mule, or you'll get killed.
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I just want to continue with gymnastics because I'm still young and fresh. I think can get some more titles under my belt.
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Taking part in an Olympics on home ground is something you dream about.
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I know what poverty is.
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I've felt that if you dwell too much on your errors, you're dealing in the negativity of things. I don't like that. I'd rather work on the positive reinforcement, the things I did well.
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The Constitution shall never be construed... to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.
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One of the ugly secrets of the renewable-energy industry is that its products make no economic sense unless they are highly subsidized.
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I don't know how to have a normal relationship because I try to act normal and love from a normal place and live a normal life, but there is sort of an abnormal magnifying glass, like telescope lens, on everything that happens.
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There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
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I love a big, character-rich story with a dark heart, with a compelling mystery or some kind of ticking clock at its center. I want to be lured in by prose, captured by character, and bound by stellar plotting to keep turning the pages.
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I have friends who are writers, but we don't tend to talk about literature very much. It's just not part of my process; I tend to be pretty secretive about what I'm working on.
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In my first publication I might have claimed that I had come to the conclusion, as a result of serious study of the literature and deep thought, that valuable antibacterial substances were made by moulds and that I set out to investigate the problem. That would have been untrue and I preferred to tell the truth that penicillin started as a chance observation. My only merit is that I did not neglect the observation and that I pursued the subject as a bacteriologist. My publication in 1929 was the starting-point of the work of others who developed penicillin especially in the chemical field.
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In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.
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I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.
