Sten Nadolny

"The world is full of important ideas, but I'll follow my own mind."

"He didn't want to learn another thing. Motionless, he constantly stared at the same spot, unseeing. He breathed as if the air were loam. ...he no longer wanted to be quick. ...he wanted to slow down u…"

"Present and past—what had Dr. Orme said about that? The light was most fully in the present when, flaring up, it met John's eye directly. Whatever else he saw must have been lit up before and now shon…"

"If he could just stay there and gaze upon the land like a stone, whole centuries long, while grassy plains became forests and swamps turned into villages or tilled land. ...He'd be recognized as human…"

"He now understood navigation. He had started with Gower's Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Navigation. ...The book itself was the ocean; when he closed it he could cover up deep water. He had re…"

"Robert Macfarlane, Read it on the autobahn, Review of The Discovery of Slowness, London Review of Books, Vol. 25 No. 24 · 18 December 2003."

"Someday he'd be quicker... to be like the sun, which only seems to wander slowly across the sky, yet whose rays are as quick as the blink of an eye. ...they reach in one instant the most distant mount…"

"The game went on. John had understood nothing. Everything was too fast: the game, the other's talk, the goings-on in the street..."