Laura van den Berg Quotes

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

Everything is a little bit of darkness, even the light.

When I define polarities in my work, I actually create the space between things. I point to the question I am actually interested in, without naming it.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

Everything in life is gray, you know.

Nothing to do with anything, something to do with everything.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'

All the things that I find beautiful have a darkness about them.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

We live in the best place on earth but at times the worst.

I want that which is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the book because I think they very often occupy the same territory in life, much as we try to separate them.

I don't think there are in life, pure darkness or pure light. Everyone's got a little of everything.

Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.

I never want readers to be comfortable, to feel like we're in a comedy or a drama. Life is never just one of those things. Life is a balance of all those things.

The reverse side also has a reverse side.

Terrible saloons might be, but they may be terribly wonderful.

For everything that you find dreadful, there's usually something that is rather marvelous as well.

Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.

The Cube is, at the same time, a symbol of simplicity and complexity.

It took me a long time to learn both good and bad can exist simultaneously.

Life really is a series of contrasts.

The light can be a curtain as well as the darkness.

People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough.