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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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 felt the impact of time, it came like a blow, and even though I knew that changes happened gradually, that moment crept up on me, when what had been behind me, a long time behind me, suddenly felt like a thing of the past. That past was real, it wasn’t unreal, it wasn’t dead, but it was behind me, further and further, in other words, I was growing old.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Min kamp 5

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Discard her, find a new one, discard her. Rise and be ruthless, a seducer of women, a man they all wanted but none could have. I put the music magazines in a heap on the bottom of my bookshelves and went downstairs. Mom was sitting and talking on the telephone in the clothes room, the door was open, she smiled at me. I stood still for a few seconds to hear who she was talking to.

One of her sisters.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Min kamp 4

“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

“Only by forgetting that one is writing can one write and give an external expression to the internal thought without it being marked or prevented by shame, as all other external expressions are.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Summer

“Romanticism is for the one, the individual, and is vertical. Romanticism is a matter between you and God, whereas Shostakovich, now that we’ve mentioned him, and in fact his name suggests itself here, is horizontal, complex, alive.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel

“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

“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