10 Quotes by Tove Ditlevsen

Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.

Med ingen kan man dele sine inderste tanker. Det vigtigste i verden er man alene med.

Hygge is a state of being you experience if you are at peace with yourself, your spouse, the tax authorities and your inner organs.

Down in the bottom of my childhood my father stands laughing.

Memory, that library of the soul from which I will draw knowledge and experience for the rest of my life.

Even though no one else cares for my poems, I have to write them because it dulls the sorrow and longing in my heart.

I wrote love poems to the man in the moon, to Ruth, or to no one at all. I thought my poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab that hasn’t yet fallen off completely. Would my adult form be shaped by my poems? I wondered. During that time I was almost always depressed. The wind in the street blew so cold through my tall, thin body that the world regarded with disapproving looks.

Hun gav sig omsider til at elske verden, men kun fordi den skulle udslettes sammen med hende.

There’s a young girl in me who refuses to die.