Every time I finish a book on my Kindle, I’ll post the phrases that I highlighted (it saves them to a text file), as my personal summary of what I read. I’ll note spoilers if there are any. Sometimes I might highlight things to look up later (like other books or music that were mentioned). “Loc.” is the location of that phrase in the e-book (since you can change the font size, what ends up on a “page” varies so e-books have locations instead).

This one’s for Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg.

Loc. 1275-76:

“There was snow on the roof that he fell from. I saw his footprints. I have a sense of snow.”

Loc. 1277-78:

“Snow is the symbol of inconstancy,” she says. “As in the book of Job.”

Loc. 2257-58:

He boils milk with fresh ginger, a quarter of a vanilla bean, and tea that is so dark and fine-leaved that it looks like black dust. He strains it and puts cane sugar in both our cups.

Loc. 2565-66:

“I just wonder how you can conclude so much from so little.” “Language is a hologram.”

Loc. 3187-88:

in a nanosecond she’s reduced from the great, proud, sovereign, invulnerable mama to a spiritual gnome.

Loc. 3194-95:

Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease. I refuse to listen to it. I refuse to be saddled with these orgies of emotional pettiness.

Loc. 3205-7:

Modesty is part of the fundamental nature of human beings. It makes me sick to think of the European idea that they can solve all their own self-induced sexual neuroses by laying the meat on the table and putting it under a microscope.

Loc. 4030-31:

I hate being scared. There is only one path to fearlessness. It’s the one that leads into the mysterious center of the terror.

Loc. 4165-66:

Only when he shows it to me on the second negative can I make it out. Just like in glaciology. One occurrence is an accident. It’s the repeat occurrence that creates a structure.

Loc. 4891-94:

JØrgensen told us that when you’re tracking something, a systematic approach will take you only so far. “Whenever I lose my glasses,” he said, “first I search for them systematically. I look in the john and next to the coffee machine and under the newspaper. But if they’re not there, I stop thinking and sit down on a chair and survey the scene to see whether an idea will come to me, and it always does; an idea always comes to me. [Loc. 4895-96] we have to discover the crook inside ourselves and figure out where we might have stashed them.”

Loc. 5678-79:

These bells reinforce the feeling that we’re at a standstill, that we’ve never left port but have remained stationary in time and space, merely twisting ourselves farther down into meaninglessness.

Loc. 5761-62:

To find out what your purpose is. Maybe that’s what Isaiah has given me. The way every child can. A sense of meaning. Of a wheel turning through me, and through him, too—a vast and frail and yet necessary movement.

Loc. 6419-22:

You have to respect the dark. Night is the time when space simmers with evil and peril. You can call it superstition. You can call it fear of the dark. But it’s ridiculous to pretend that the night is just like the day, simply without light. Night is the time to huddle together indoors. If you don’t happen to be alone and have other obligations, that is.

Loc. 6459-62:

In Greenland I never had any cavities; now I have twelve fillings. Every year I need another one. I refuse to have novocaine. I’ve developed a strategy for handling the pain. I breathe deeply from my abdomen, and right before the drill pierces the enamel into the dentine of the tooth, I think to myself that now something is happening to me that I have to accept. That’s how I become an involved but not overwhelmed spectator to the pain.

Loc. 6571:

We live in a world of compressed juxtapositions.

Loc. 7517-22:

At first the snow is six-sided, newly formed flakes. After forty-eight hours the flakes break down, their outlines blur. By the tenth day, the snow is a grainy crystal that becomes compacted after two months. After two years it enters the transitional stage between snow and firn. After three years it becomes névé. After four years, it’s transformed into a large, blocky glacial crystal. It wouldn’t survive more than three years here on Gela Alta. By that time the glacier would push it out to sea. There it would break up and float outward to melt, disperse, and be absorbed by the sea. And then someday it would rise up as newly formed snow.

Loc. 7598:

Jules Verne’s book The Hunt for a Meteor

Loc. 7599:

Piper’s Uller Uprising

Loc. 7958-59:

At some point he will stop, and the cold will transform him; like a stalactite, a frozen shell will close around a barely fluid life until even his pulse stops and he becomes one with the landscape. You can’t win against the ice.