## Metadata - Author: [[Derek B. Miller ]] - Full Title: Norwegian by Night - Category: #books ## Highlights - They’d been tracking him since 1951—he was sure of it. You don’t kill twelve men named Kim from the top of a seawall at Inchon and think they’re going to forgive and forget. Not the Koreans. They have Chinese patience, but an Italian-style vendetta streak. And they blend. ([Location 118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=118)) - But a child does not know how to manage silence. About the need to keep comedy and tragedy as close to each other as humanly possible—as close as pathos and words will allow—to try to shut out the voices of the dead. ([Location 1010](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=1010)) - “God made the world, said it was good,” says Sheldon aloud. “Fine. But when did he reappraise?” ([Location 1014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=1014)) - Insanity is merely the absence of sanity. It is not a thing in itself. It is everything but sane. And that’s all we know about it. We don’t even have a real word for it. ([Location 1273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=1273)) - “Sanity? You want to know what sanity is? Sanity is the thick soup of distraction we immerse ourselves in to keep from remembering that we’re gonna bite it. Every opinion and taste and order you place for brown mustard instead of yellow mustard is just a way to keep from thinking about it. And they call our ability to distract ourselves sanity. So when you get to the end, and you forget whether you prefer brown or yellow mustard, they say you’re going nuts. But that isn’t it. What’s really going on is this. In those little senior moments of clarity, when your head is flipping back and forth between brown and yellow like a tennis match on fast forward, and you suddenly pause, you find yourself undistracted. And it happens. You look straight across the net at all the other people trying to choose between brown and yellow mustard and . . . there he is! At the seat in center court! Death! He’s been there all along! Mustard on the left and right, distractions everywhere, and Death straight ahead. It hits you like a swinging vat of onion soup.” ([Location 1275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=1275)) - There is something about the way the Jews bear witness to history that Lars has always found unsettling. They speak as witnesses. Since Egypt. Since the morning of Western civilization, when its light shone west from Jerusalem and Athens, and blanketed Rome and all that it would leave behind. They have watched the Western tribes and empires rise and fall—from the Babylonians to the Gauls, from the Moors to the Hapsburgs to the Ottomans—and have alone remained. They have seen it all. And the rest of us wait for the verdict that is still, even now, to come. ([Location 1290](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=1290)) - He knew what would come. Still, just in this moment, it had not happened yet. He was between the knowledge and the reality of what was to come—just where Cassandra found herself before it drove her mad. It was a precious moment. ([Location 1556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=1556)) - Sigrid isn’t political—except when the politicians irritate her —but it strikes her that there are two ways you can act: on faith or on evidence. And if it’s going to be faith, then liberals and conservatives alike have to be grouped in the same camp as people who govern from their heart and not their head. The only decision to be made about them is whether their views give you a warm feeling. And on the other side are those trying to make things better by facing things the way they are, and working from there. ([Location 1745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=1745)) - “What I mean,” he’d continued, “is that the buildings, the desks, the great structures are all products of ideas. So it isn’t the buildings that matter. It is the ideas. But because the buildings are shiny and expensive, and the ideas are more elusive, we tend to become dazzled by the buildings—that is, the artifice. In fact, they distract us from the ideas that fill them. People stand on the steps of great buildings and feel awe before they enter. Why? The ideas don’t know where they are being expressed. When I read history, I don’t read about the great buildings; I read about the ideas of empires. They all asked similar questions, but came to different answers. It is a fact that when we compare worlds, those worlds are different. “The interesting bit is this. For those worlds to hold together, the ideas must be shared. So I like to look to the ideas that are being shared. Who is involved? What are they thinking? What do these ideas make possible? What, for them, is obvious, and what is impossible to imagine? What is permissible, and what is not? “And if you can’t start with the ideas, because they are hidden, first start with who is talking to whom to get things done. Patterns always emerge. If things are getting done, there is a pattern behind it. You can be sure that it’s more than mere motive. There is . . . a logic that holds the conversation together.” ([Location 1765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=1765)) - A higher wisdom was, even then, available for consultation. ([Location 1939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=1939)) - The line from this moment to Saul’s death in Vietnam was to be, for Sheldon, immutable and absolute. ([Location 1941](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=1941)) - “This country is what you make it. You understand that? It isn’t good and it isn’t bad. It’s just what you make it. That means you don’t make excuses for America’s bullshit. That’s what the Nazis and commies do. The Fatherland. The Motherland. America isn’t your parent. It’s your kid. And today I made America a place where you get your nose broken for telling a Jew he can’t play a round of golf. The only one allowed to tell me I can’t play golf is the ball.” ([Location 1947](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=1947)) - “Look. We’re in Norway. You want everything to be like home? Go home. You want to be here, you take advantage of what they have here. Here they have caffe latte and cinnamon buns, pretty girls in fuzzy boots, and old American cars that come out in the summer. It’s not so bad, really.” ([Location 2049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=2049)) - Point is, you use a knife for knife things. Now we are reaching for a magnifying glass to play Sherlock. Not the same thing at all. No such thing as an all-purpose tool. This is what my father taught me.” ([Location 2072](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=2072)) - You know the Norwegian police? They’re a bunch of pussies. They don’t carry guns, just like the English. But they stay after things for years and years, nagging and nagging. They’re like herpes. You think you’re rid of them, and then, when you’re a little stressed out, boom! There they are. In the end, they catch all the killers. They exhaust their prey into submission. ([Location 2095](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=2095)) - He begins to sense that silence itself is a kind of language. There is more there than death and memory. More than the voices of the lost. There is something in Europe’s silence that he has not heard before. But he will not live long enough to fully understand it. And so he holds this new insight as loosely as a poem found by accident. One with no title and no author. One experienced and never found again. ([Location 2563](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=2563)) - They’d met on a bus four years ago. In the fumbling way of adolescents, they neither chose nor rejected each other. ([Location 2736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=2736)) - “So I wasn’t conceived in love.” “That question is self-pitying, and it isn’t worthy of you. You know perfectly well that your grandmother and I adore you. For my two cents, being conceived in indifference but raised in love is better than the inverse. ([Location 2976](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=2976)) - Petter hands her a small silver key less than two centimeters long, with a tooth that splits into two. The rudimentary lock is designed to do little more than deter siblings, parents, and other perpetrators just long enough to be arrested by their own sense of guilt. ([Location 3111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=3111)) - It is all clearer now than it was then. Rhea would say it is the vivid fabrication of an aging mind. More likely, though, it is the clarity that comes from aging—from the natural process of releasing the mind from imagined futures, and allowing the present and the past to take their rightful place at the center of our attention. ([Location 3318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=3318)) - He knows that the human eye is most attuned to movement and only then registers color. We are not hunters. We are designed as prey, and our senses control us like prey. ([Location 3474](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=3474)) - The best he can do is shoot for the center of mass and hope that his hands do not twitch, that the gun reacts, and that Paul will come when he is called. Or, to be more precise, he hopes that Paul will run into the woods when a name that is not his is called out in a language he does not speak by a man holding a rifle and dressed like a bush. This is not a good plan. ([Location 3622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LQ1B1W&location=3622))