Henrik Ibsen Quotes

“He last, late guest
To the gate we followed;
Goodbye – and the rest
The night-wind swallowed.

House, garden, street,
Lay tenfold gloomy,
Where accents sweet
Had made music to me.

It was but a feast
With the dark coming on;
She was but a guest –
And now, she is gone.”
― Henrik Ibsen

“Jeg har aldri i mitt liv skrevet "slibrig"; men jeg kunne gi anvisning på dristigere ting i mine bøker enn hva som stod i den tyske fortelling. De er å finne f.eks. både i "Sult" og "Pan". Men når Jacob Sverdrup leser over igjen disse steder og forarges, så vil jeg også be ham lese f.eks. Ibsens "Lille Eyolf" påny. Den lille nydelige, senile råhet, champagnen som ei ble rørt, bør han virkelig nippe til. Og huske. Og bruke.”
― Knut Hamsun, Selected Letters 1879-1898

“Eine "moderne" Erzählung muss ein Schlag ins Gesicht der "kompakten Mehrheit" sein.”
― Henrik Ibsen

“This is not a conspiracy theory; it doesn’t have to be. Societies tell themselves necessary fictions in the same way that individuals and families do. Henrik Ibsen called them “vital lies,” and psychologist Daniel Goleman describes them working the same way on the social level that they do within families: “The collusion is maintained by directing attention away from the fearsome fact, or by repackaging its meaning in an acceptable format.” The costs of these social blind spots, he writes, are destructive communal illusions. Possibilities for women have become so open-ended that they threaten to destabilize the institutions on which a male-dominated culture has depended, and a collective panic reaction on the part of both sexes has forced a demand for counterimages.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“[...] og at han la særlig vekt på å gjennomgå Ibsens dramaer med sine elever, da var det den andre kunne si: Ja, Ibsen, ja, han ligger nok for høyt for meg, eller: Nei, du vet, jeg har aldri kommet til å interessere meg for litteratur, og i dette lå det en beklagelse, og den var ikke deres egen, for de var jo så lite interessert i litteratur og Ibsens dramaer at de ikke så noen grunn til å beklage det, hva i himmelens navn var det de skulle beklage, for sin egen del? Nei, det var som samfunnsmennesker de fant det nødvendig å uttrykk denne beklagelse, altså beklagelse som et nødvendig uttrykk for den dannelse ethvert sivilisert samfunn søker å gi sine borgere, og som det, som man ser, i dette tilfellet hadde lykkes med. At enkle samtaler mellom gamle kjente som tilfeldigvis treffes etter noen år, arter seg slik, og ikke på stikk motsatt vis, på dette bygger et hvert sivilisert samfunn sine fundamenter, hadde han ofte tenkt, ikke minst i de siste åra.”
― Dag Solstad, Timidezza e dignità

“Enten går Nora, eller så går JEG!”
― Johannes Møllehave, Replikker og pointer: Noter og anekdoter fra humorens depoter

“In 1908, the great Russian actress Alla Nazimova played Nora in New York in performances that became legendary. In the audience was Halvdan Koht, who describes Nazimova in the last scene acting “with a passionate intensity that made Nora’s transformation at the end completely an inner reality, conveyed in low-pitched, emotion-laden words” (K 323). Koht recalls his horror when members of the audience, mistaking “the work of art” for “a collection of ideas,” began to applaud Nora’s every line “as though it were a political harangue” (K 323). But while not a harangue, Nora’s words are nevertheless resoundingly political, for in representing the “inner reality” of an obscure Norwegian housewife, they constitute a discourse of recognition for every woman who has ever lived her life for a man, and by Nora’s count, there are “millions.” Displaying what the modern theatre condemns as bad manners, the 1908 audience was responding to Ibsen’s powerful feminist poetry, the exhilarating promise that on the other side of the doll house, women, no less then men, could learn to take themselves seriously: “I believe that, before all else, I’m a human being, no less than you — or anyway, I ought to try to become one” (193). The universality of A Doll House does not come from “its demand for truth in every human relation” (K 323), but in its demand for equality in the relation between women and men.”
― Joan Templeton, Ibsen's Women