Karl Ove Knausgaard > Quotes

“When, shortly afterward, I stopped at the top of the hill and saw the town beneath me, my feeling of happiness was so ecstatic that I didn’t know how I would be able to make it home, sit there and write, eat, or sleep. But the world is constructed in such a way that it meets you halfway in moments precisely like these, your inner joy seeks an outer counterpart and finds it, it always does, even in the bleakest regions of the world, for nothing is as relative as beauty. Had the world been different, in my opinion, without mountains and oceans, plains and seas, deserts and forests, and consisted of something else, inconceivable to us, as we don’t know anything other than this, we would also have found it beautiful. A world with gloes and raies, evanbillits and conulames, for example, or ibitera, proluffs, and lopsits, whatever they might be, we would have sung their praises because that is the way we are, we extol the world and love it although it’s not necessary, the world is the world, it’s all we have. So as I walked down the steps toward the town center on this Wednesday at the end of August I had a place in my heart for everything I beheld. A slab of stone worn smooth in a flight of steps: fantastic. A swaybacked roof side by side with an austere perpendicular brick building: so beautiful. A limp hot-dog wrapper on a drain grille, which the wind lifts a couple of meters and then drops again, this time on the pavement flecked with white stepped-on chewing gum: incredible. A lean old man hobbling along in a shabby suit carrying a bag bulging with bottles in one hand: what a sight. The world extended its hand, and I took it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard

“The heart is always right. It never errs. The heart never errs. The heart never ever errs.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Min kamp 5

“It is often windy here, the great sails of wind that build up over the ocean meet no obstacles and come rushing in over the land, but today it was perfectly still, the light stood motionless in the air, and all the muted colours unfolded calmly in it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Så mye lengsel på så liten flate. En bok om Edvard Munchs bilder

“I don’t know what is more frightening: a creature on a small planet worshipping itself and its world as if infinity did not exist, or a creature who burns its fellow beings because the infinite does exist.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Om vinteren

“And that the death we carry within us, which Rilke compares to a fruit, grows inside us until ripe, and is in other words alive, belonging to life itself.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel

“Our spirits rose after a few beers, all that lay between us during the day, the silences that could develop from nowhere, the irritation that could set in, the sudden inability to find areas of common interest, even though there were so many, all of that vanished as our spirits soared and we felt the concomitant warmth: we looked at each other and knew who we were.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard

“For it isn't the pupils you are seeing then, not the irises nor the whites of the eyes. It is the soul, the archaic light of the soul the eyes are filled with, and to gaze into the eyes of the one you love when love is at its most powerful belongs among the highest joys.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn

“so much of what we see lies in the name; that is an apple tree, that is an elm, that is a cherry tree, that is a spruce. If we look at it for longer, we might get beneath the name and see it as a unique, singular tree and not merely as a representative of the category it belongs to. And eventually we may even be able to see what it 'is', its presence in the world. But by then we will have come to know it so well that it will seem familiar to us, which in turn creates a distance, for that's how it is with the familiar, isn't it, friends we've known for years - we no longer see them, we just note their presence, allowing it to fill the category we have created for them.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Så mye lengsel på så liten flate. En bok om Edvard Munchs bilder

“Thus, Fyodorov suggests, at some point in time it will be possible to trace every atom that once belonged to a person and to put them all together again.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel

“I was the kind to endure. No one had said you couldn’t become a better person through endurance.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard

“Who’s that?” Yngve said, nodding discreetly in the direction of a woman. She wore a hat with a veil that concealed her face. “No idea,” I said. “But all self-respecting funerals have a woman no one recognizes.” We laughed. “Well, the danger’s over now,” Yngve said, and we both laughed again.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard

“I want to show you the world, as it is, all around us, all the time. Only by doing so will I myself be able to glimpse it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn

“few things are a more satisfying substitute for the presence of other people than writing, which at the same time provides an excuse for one's antisocial behaviour, for everyone knows that someone who writes has a great need for solitude.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Summer

“Mood isn't a particular thought or a particular part of the brain, nor in a particular part of the body, such as a foot or an ear, it is everywhere, but nothing in itself, more like a colour in which thoughts are thought, a colour through which the world is seen.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Min kamp 5

“It was such a terrible time. I knew so little, had such ambitions and achieved nothing. But what spirits I was in before I went!”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Min kamp 5

“I was the son of the man who had ruined everything.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard

“I had never imagined that happiness could hurt so much.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard

“Yes. What I haven’t made sense of yet, I never will.’ ‘You’re more right than you know,’ he said. ‘But that’s something you won’t understand until you’re my age.’ ‘Understand what?’ ‘That we never get older, not really. It just looks that way. Inside, we’re still nineteen, all of us.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel

“We come from far away, from terrifying beauty, for a newborn child who opens its eyes for the first time is like a star, is like a sun, but we live our lives amid pettiness and stupidity, in the world of burned hot dogs and wobbly camping tables. The great and terrifying beauty does not abandon us, it is there all the time, in everything that is always the same, in the sun and the stars, in the bonfire and the darkness, in the blue carpet of flowers beneath the tree. It is of no use to us, it is too big for us, but we can look at it, and we can bow before it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Om våren

“reading a good novel is like seeing a landscape emerge when water subsides”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Summer

“Letters are nothing but dead signs, and books are their coffins.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn

“The job of the terrorists was to penetrate into our subconscious. This had always been the aim of writers, but the terrorists took it a step further. They were the writers of our age. Don DeLillo said this many years before 9/11. The images they created spread around the globe, colonising our our subconscious minds. The tangible outcome of the attack, the numbers of dead and injured, the material destruction, meant nothing. It was the images that were important. The more iconic the images they managed to create, the more successful their actions. The attack on the World Trade Centre was the most successful of all time. There weren’t that many dead, only a couple of thousand, as against the six hundred thousand who died in the first two days of the Battle Of Flanders in the autumn of 1914, yet the images were so iconic and powerful that the effect on us was just as devastating, perhaps more so, since we lived in a culture of images.
Planes and skyscrapers. Icarus and Babel.
They wanted into our dreams. Everyone did. Our inner beings were the final market. Once they were conquered, we would be sold.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 6

“Time is distance, and when it is suspended, we are no longer in the world but a part of the world.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn

“A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and parking lots, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 1

“The countryside around us changed again. Now we were driving through forest. Sørland forests with mountain crags here and there among the trees, hills covered with spruce and oaks, aspen and birch, sporadic dark moorland, sudden meadows, flatland with densely growing pine trees. When I was a boy I used to imagine the sea rising and filling the forest so that the hilltops became islets you could sail between and on which you could bathe. Of all my childhood fantasies this was the one that captivated me most; the thought that you could swim over bus shelters and roofs, perhaps dive down and glide through a door, up a staircase, into a living room. Or just through a forest, with its slopes, cliffs, cairns, and ancient trees. At a certain point in childhood my most exciting game was building dams in streams, watching the water swell and cover the marsh, the roots, the grass, the rocks, the beaten earth path beside the stream. It was hypnotic. Not the mention the cellar we found in an unfinished house filled with shiny, black water we sailed on in two styrofoam boxes, when we were around five years old. Hypnotic. The same applied to winter when we skated along frozen streams in which grass, sticks, twigs, and small plants stood upright in the translucent ice beneath us.

What had been the great attraction? And what had happened to it?

Another fantasy I had at that time was that there were two enormous saw blades sticking out from the side of the car, chopping off everything as we drove past. Trees and streetlamps, houses and outhouses, but also people and animals. If someone was waiting for a bus they would be sliced through the middle, their top half falling like a felled tree, leaving feet and waist standing and the wound bleeding.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Min kamp 1

“I returned the glass to the table and stubbed out my cigarette. There was nothing left of my feelings for those I had just spent several hours with. The whole crowd of them could have burned in hell for all I cared. This was a rule in my life. When I was with other people I was bound to them, the nearness I felt was immense, the empathy great. Indeed, so great that their well-being was always more important than my own. I subordinated myself, almost to the verge of self-effacement; some uncontrollable internal mechanism caused me to put their thoughts and opinions before mine. But the moment I was alone others meant nothing to me . . . Between these two perspectives there was no halfway point. There was just the small, self-effacing one and the large, distance-creating one. And in between them was where my daily life lay. Perhaps that was why I had such a hard time living it. Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or that made me happy. This had nothing to do with a lack of desire to wash floors or change diapers but rather with something more fundamental: the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Min kamp 2

“The truth is we don't know what we're doing. We don't know where it's going to lead. It's a known fact that children of divorce are over-represented in the crime figures, and the younger they were when the parents divorced, the greater the risk of them getting into trouble. But we won't give up the right to divorce, so instead we say it's best for the kids. In any system it's impossible to foresee all effects. To get back to the motor car: if anyone had said that the invention of the motor car was going to kill thousands of people every year, would we have put it into production and centred our lives around it the way we have? No. So we don't talk about that, we say the motor car brings us freedom and opportunity instead. And when capitalism increased its hold and we needed more labour, did anyone say women have got to leave the home now and start producing goods, so we can double the labour force? Not to mention double the numbers of consumers? No, they didn't. That was comen wanting the same rights as men. The right to work, what kind of a right is t hat? How's that supposed to be liberating? It's just the opposite, a prison. The consequence of that is that our kids are farmed out to an institution from the age of two, and what happens then? Mum and dad are almost driven insane, aren't they? They're riddled with guilt, so they spend all the time they can on their kids when they're not at work, trying to be as close to them as possible. Compensation, compensation, compensation.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard

“Now that Nazism has become 'they', it is easy to distance ourselves from it, but this was not the case when Nazism was 'we'. If we are to understand what happened and how it was possible, we must understand this first. And we must understand too that Nazism in its various elements was not monstrous in itself, by which I mean that it did not arise as something obviously monstrous and evil, separate from all else in the current society, but was on the contrary part of that current. The gas chambers were not a German invention, but were conceived by Americans who realised that people could be put to death by placing them in a chamber infused with posionous gas, a procedure they carried out for the first time in 1919. Paranoid anti-Semitism was not a German phenomenon either, the world's most celebrated and passionate anti-Semite in 1925 being not Adolf Hitler but Henry Ford. And racial biology was not an abject, shameful discipline pursued at the bottom of society or its shabby periphery, it was the scientific state of the art, much as genetics is today, haloed by the light of the future and all its hope. Decent humans distanced themselves from all this, but they were few, and this fact demands our consideration, for who are we going to be when our decency is put to the test? Will we have the courage to speak against what everyone else believes, our friends, neighbours and colleagues, to insist that we are decent and they are not? Great is the power of the we, almost inescapable its bonds, and the only thing we can really do is to hope our we is a good we. Because if evil comes it will not come as 'they', in the guise of the unfamiliar that we might turn away without effort, it will come as 'we'. It will come as what is right.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 6

“Nearness is undemanding and therefore unproductive in a way. What we know is near to us – no effort required. What we don’t know is remote from us, at a distance, we’re not in the same place as what we don’t know, and so we have to traverse that distance in order to learn. Longing requires distance – longing for another place, another state, another person, another set of things we know – and if there’s one thing that drives us, individually and collectively, it’s longing.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity

“Different animals inhabit radically different realities, as do different insects, plants and trees,”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel