Top 30 Carsten Jensen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Two drowning people can’t save each other. All they can do is drag each other down.”

— Carsten Jensen

2. “Novels are about exploring unexplored territory in the human experience or, at least, drawing new maps of old lands.”

— Carsten Jensen

3. “That’s the strange thing about a good story. No pleasure if you can’t share it.”

— Carsten Jensen

4. “Human beings are afflicted by a need to judge.”

— Carsten Jensen

5. “Nature was neither fair nor unfair. Those terms belonged to the world of men.”

— Carsten Jensen

6. “But that’s how it is on a sailing ship, and in this respect its journey parallels that of life: simply knowing where you want to go isn’t enough, because life is a windblown voyage, consisting mainly of the detours imposed by alternating calm and storm.”

— Carsten Jensen

7. “Many years ago there lived a man called Laurids Madsen who went up to heaven and came down again thanks to his boots.”

— Carsten Jensen

8. “An unused conscience is no conscience at all.”

— Carsten Jensen

9. “Our mother sticks a knife in our heart when we say goodbye on the wharf. And we stick a knife in hers when we go. And that’s how we’re connected: through the hurt we inflict on one another.”

— Carsten Jensen

10. “With no other choices open to us, we’d turned our gaze seaward. The oceans were our America: they reached farther than any prairie, untamed as on the first day of creation. Nobody owned them.”

— Carsten Jensen

11. “Life was like one big marching army. Death ran alongside and picked off a soldier here and there, but that didn’t affect the army. Its march continued, and its size didn’t seem to diminish. On the contrary, it grew on into eternity, so that no one was alone in death. Someone else would always follow. That was what counted. Such was the chain of life: unbreakable. But.”

— Carsten Jensen

12. “But tonight we danced with the drowned. And they were us.”

— Carsten Jensen

13. “We don’t sail because the sea is there. We sail because there’s a harbour. We don’t start by heading for distant shores. We seek protection first.”

— Carsten Jensen

14. “He wasn’t physically impotent. So the impotence must lie in his soul. Finding oblivion in a moment’s ecstasy was all he could manage.”

— Carsten Jensen

15. “No, Captain Madsen, you don’t regret having had a child simply because you lose it. Having a child isn’t a deal you strike with life. As I said: a child is a gift. And what remains after a child is gone is the memory of the years it was allowed to live. Not its death.”

— Carsten Jensen

16. “We were familiar with the line that separates grief from madness, and we know that sometimes the only way to stay on the right side of it is to scream.”

— Carsten Jensen

17. “Loss was a night that never ended.”

— Carsten Jensen

18. “Contrary to what most people think, weeping isn’t an uncontrollable emotion that spills into tears. It’s the opposite, a channel for feelings, a way to divert them in a healthy direction.”

— Carsten Jensen

19. “Perhaps the greatest thing you can achieve is to love without demanding anything in return.”

— Carsten Jensen

20. “There was plenty for the eye to feast on, but nothing for the soul. He had a hunger for something that no sky could satisfy. Somewhere on the planet there had to be a different kind of light.”

— Carsten Jensen

21. “At times he agreed with Anton: they were united by their silence. If they began articulating their thoughts, they’d feed one another’s insanity and everything would fall apart.”

— Carsten Jensen

22. “He felt Miss Kristina’s presence like something poisonous and something infinitely sweet mixing together in his blood. Inside him, a lack of willpower and a colossal tension battled it out. He felt both weak and furious at the same time. He went around with his fists clenched, ready to fight, yet what he wanted most of all was to hold and be held.”

— Carsten Jensen

23. “No, he hadn’t known anything about children, but now he’d learned something: a child’s mind is open to everything.”

— Carsten Jensen

24. “There comes a time in the life of a sailor when he no longer belongs ashore. It’s then that he surrenders to the Pacific, where no land blocks the eye, where sky and ocean mirror each other until above and below have lost their meaning, and the Milky Way looks like the spume of a breaking wave and the globe itself rolls like a boat in the midst of the sinking and heaving surf of that starry sky, and even the sun is nothing but a tiny glowing dot of phosphorescence on the sea of the night.”

— Carsten Jensen

25. “War was like sailing. You could learn about clouds, wind direction, and currents, but the sea remained forever unpredictable. All you could do was adapt to it and try to return home alive.”

— Carsten Jensen

26. “As long as our voiced were in harmony, it didn’t matter that our accents were at war.”

— Carsten Jensen

27. “Yes, he was a rock she could cling to. But he was also a rock she could smash herself to pieces against.”

— Carsten Jensen

28. “To Ejinar that cannonball was a monster with a will of its own. It showed him what war was: not a battery that exploded and sent matchstick soldiers fleeing, but a dragon that breathed hot fire on his naked heart.”

— Carsten Jensen

29. “But I could feel resentment inside me, and I knew it would keep growing until it changed into something far more dangerous.”

— Carsten Jensen

30. “We swore that we’d die with our boots on. But then, that’s what you do when you drown.”

— Carsten Jensen

31. “But hope stops time, and time only heals when its flow is not stopped.”

— Carsten Jensen

32. “Your roots aren’t to be found in your childhood so much as in your child. It’s he who provides your link to the world, and home is wherever he is.”

— Carsten Jensen

33. “Beyond the reef’s white surf the water was a deep blue, as if in shadow, but in here it was emerald so dazzling you’d think the sand below contained a source of energy as strong as the sun.”

— Carsten Jensen

34. “Their eyes persecuted him everywhere, eventually following him all the way into the darkness around his bed and into his dreams, like a madness that threatened to overpower him.”

— Carsten Jensen