Famous Quotes & Sayings

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Karl Ove Knausgard.

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Famous Quotes By Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 859762

A problem with my novels is that they, from the start, have been infantile and incredibly childish. There are childishness, stupidity, lack of wisdom, fantasies. At the same time, that's where my creativity can be found. If I tried to control it and make it more mature, it wouldn't be good at all. It'd be uninteresting, without any vivacity. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 2115954

Oh, this is the song about the young man who loves a young woman. Has he the right to use such a word as "love"? He knows nothing about life, he knows nothing about her, he knows nothing about himself. All he knows is that he has never felt anything with such force and clarity before. Everything hurts, but nothing is as good. Oh, this is the song about being sixteen years old and sitting on a bus and thinking about her, the one, not knowing that feelings will slowly, slowly, weaken and fade, that life, that which is now so vast and so all-embracing, will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity that doesn't hurt so much, but nor is it as good. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1664159

From my own childhood I remember only a handful of incidents, all of which I regarded as momentous, but which I now understand were a few events among many, which completely expunges their meaning, for how can I know that those particular episodes that lodged themselves in my mind were decisive, and not all the others of which I remember nothing? — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1296167

I've always been a fast reader. Now I had to do it slowly, discussing each sentence. And every time I wanted to change something I had to come up with an intelligent defense I could be pretty sure that they would turn my suggestion down, as they had so many aspects to keep in mind. However, if I argued well, I could have a chance. I had to think of every comma, every word. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1485135

Here he stands before me as he was, in midlife, and perhaps that is why reading them is so painful for me, he wasn't only much more than my feelings for him but infinitely more, a complete and living person in the midst of his life. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 516482

A lot happens in our everyday life, but it always happens within the same routine, and more than anything else it has changed my perspective of time. For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1580108

We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 810739

And isn't it actually unbelievable that one simple name encompasses all of this? The fetus in the belly, the infant on the changing table, the forty-year-old in front of the computer, the old man in the chair, the corpse on the bench? — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 2129002

Shame tells you when you've gone too far. Then you try if it's okay to go too far. And it might be so that shame was right. You can never, never know that. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 915640

You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1217616

The very thought of Dad, the fact that he existed, caused fear to pump through my body. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1886605

The tree was so old, and stood there so alone, that his childish heart had been filled with compassion; if no one else on the farm gave it a thought, he would at least do his best to, even though he suspected that his child's words and child's deeds didn't make much difference. It had stood there before he was born, and would be standing there after he was dead, but perhaps, even so, it was pleased that he stroked its bark every time he passed, and sometimes, when he was sure he wasn't observed, even pressed his cheek against it. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 2198839

I can't speak for other writers, but I write to create something that is better than myself, I think that's the deepest motivation, and it is so because I'm full of self-loathing and shame. Writing doesn't make me a better person, nor a wiser and happier one, but the writing, the text, the novel, is a creation of something outside of the self, an object, kind of neutralized by the objectivity of literature and form; the temper, the voice, the style; all in it is carefully constructed and controlled. This is writing for me: a cold hand on a warm forehead. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 732702

It was a very special feeling to wake up in the morning, all alone in a flat, it was as though emptiness were not only around me but also inside me. Until I started at the gymnas I had always woken to a house where Mom and Dad were already up and on their way to work with all that entailed, cigarette smoke, coffee drinking, listening to the radio, eating breakfast, and car engines warming up outside in the dark. This was something else, and I loved it. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1036761

Now let's see. The class reps on the council this year are therefore Eivind and Marianne!
I looked down at the desk in front of me.
One vote.
How was that possible?
And, to cap it off, the one vote was my own.
But I was the best student in the class! At least in Norwegian! And natural and social sciences! And in math I was the second best, or perhaps the third. But, altogether, who could be better than me?
OK, Eivind won. But one vote? How was that possible?
Hadn't anyone voted for me?
There had to be a mistake somewhere.
No one? — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 984079

I had no future either, not because it existed somewhere else but because I couldn't imagine it. That I might control my future and try to make it turn out the way I wanted was completely beyond my horizon. Everything was of the moment, I took everything as it came and acted on the basis of premises I didn't even know myself, and without realizing this is what I did. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1358826

The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child's reality and an adult's, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 558326

What a stupid, fucking, idiotic country this was. All the young women drank water in such vast quantities that it was coming out of their ears, they thought it was "beneficial" and "healthy," but all it did was send the numbers of incontinent young people soaring. Children ate whole wheat pasta and whole wheat bread and all sorts of weird coarse-grained rice that their stomachs could not digest properly, but it didn't matter because it was "beneficial," it was "healthy," it was "wholesome." Oh, they were confusing food with the mind, they thought they could eat their way to being better human beings without understanding that food is one thing and the notions food evokes another. And if you said that, you were either a reactionary or just a Norwegian, in other words ten years behind the times. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1417790

You're the only person I know who can take communion despite not believing in God and not commit blasphemy. The only person I know. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 508016

But Dad was no longer breathing. That was what had happened to him, the connection with the air had been broken, now it pushed against him like any other object, a log, a gasoline can, a sofa. He no longer poached air, because that is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world. He was lying somewhere in town now. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 160716

The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 609099

Besides, tomorrow everything would look different. The day always came with more than mere light. However frayed your emotions, it was impossible to be wholly unaffected by the day's new beginnings. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1376324

I'd had the picture of John Lennon in my room all the time I was at gymnas and proceeded to hang it on the wall behind the typewriter. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1556640

He was the kind to cut through to the essence, and thus someone who made a difference. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1283039

The sun rose in my life. At first, as dawn breaking on the horizon, almost as if to say, this is where you have to look. Then came the first rays of sunshine, everything became clearer, lighter, more alive, and I became happier and happier, and then it hung in the sky of my life and shone and shone and shone. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1505252

In the modernist era the division between art and the world was close to absolute, or put another way, art was a world of its own. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1151509

Until I moved to Stockhold I had felt there was a continuity to my life, as if it stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together by new connections, in a complex and ingenious pattern in which every phenomenon I saw was capable of evoking a memory which unleashed small landslides of feeling in me, some with a known source, others without. The people I encountered came from towns I had been to, they knew other people I had met, it was a network, and it was a tight mesh. But when I moved to Stockholm this flaring up of memories became rarer and rarer, and one day it ceased altogether. That is, I could still remember; what happened was that the memories no longer stirred anything in me. No longing, no wish to return, nothing. Just the memory, and a barely perceptible hint of an aversion to anything that was connected with it. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 125740

I had always liked darkness. When I was small I was afraid of it if I was alone, but when I was with other I loved it and the change to the world it brought. Running around in the forest or between houses was different in the darkness, the world was enchanted, and we, we were breathless adventurers with blinking eyes and pounding hearts.
When I was older there was little I liked better than to stay up at night, the silence and the darkness had an allure, they carreid the promise of something immense. And autumn was my favorite season, wandering along the road by the river in the dark and the rain, not much could beat that.
But this darkness was different. This darkness rendered everything lifeless. It was static, it was the same whether you were awake or asleep, and it became harder and harder to motivate yourself to get up in the morning. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 894908

The thought of this could sometimes weigh me down because I wanted so much to be someone. I wanted so much to be special. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 794023

For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on. At the same time I see that precisely this repetitiveness, this enclosedness, this unchangingness is necessary, it protects me. On the few occasions I have left it, all the old ills return. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 2075000

At the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. When you were forty you realized it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless you did something. Unless you took one last gamble. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1353838

This wasn't about knowledge but about the aura knowledge exuded, the places it came from, which were almost all outside the world we lived in now, yet were still within the ambivalent space where all historical objects and ideas reside. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1630108

In the mist, in the darkness of the forest, in the dewdrops on the spruce needles. In the whales that swam in the sea, in the heart beating in my breast. Mist, heart, blood, trees. Why were they so appealing? What was it that enticed me with such power? That filled me with such enormous desire? Mist, heart, blood, trees. Oh, if only I could write about them, no, not write about them but make my writing be them, then I would be happy. Then I would have peace of mind. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1640333

For a moment I was filled with the sensation of white snow against black water. The way the whiteness erases all the detail around a lake or a river in the forest so that the difference between land and water is absolute, and the water lies there as a deeply alien entity, a black hole in the world. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1491114

I would have loved to buy a hot dog from her, just to watch her squeezing the ketchup and mustard from the plastic bottles over the sausage, — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1564266

Continually, a storm blew through our world and it always had, and the only place I knew where this was formulated, the most extreme yet simplest things, was in these holy scriptures. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1491797

We don't live our lives alone, but that doesn't mean we see those alongside whom we live our lives. When Dad moved to Northern Norway and was no longer physically in front of me with his body and his voice, his temper and his eyes, in a way he disappeared from my life, in the sense that he was reduced to a kind of discomfort I occasionally felt when he called or when something reminded me of him, then a kind of zone within me was activated, and in that zone lay all my feelings for him, but he was not there. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1741492

There was something I couldn't do and something I didn't understand. There were secrets and there was darkness, there were shady dealings and there was laughter that jeered at everything. Oh, I sensed it, but I knew nothing about it. Nothing. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1476994

What would the days be like now?
It was Mom who bound us all together, it was Mom who was at the center of Yngve's and my life, we knew that, Dad knew that, but perhaps she didn't. How else could she leave us like this?
Knives and forks clinking on plates, elbows moving, heads held stiff, straight backs. No one saying a word. That is us three, a father and two sons, sitting and eating. Around us, on all sides, it is the seventies.
The silence grows. And we notice it, all three of us, the silence is not the kind that can ease, it is the kind that lasts a lifetime. Well, of course, you can say something inside it, you can talk, but the silence doesn't stop for that reason. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1451906

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1854616

He pulled me up into the world of advanced literature, where you wrote essays about a line of Dante, where nothing could be made complex enough, where art dealt with the supreme, not in a high-flown sense because it was the modernist canon with which we were engaged, but in the sense of the ungraspable, which was best illustrated by Blanchot's description of Orpheus's gaze, the night of the night, the negation of the negation, which of course was in some way above the trivial and in many ways wretched lives we lived, but what I learned was that also our ludicrously inconsequential lives, in which we could not attain anything of what we wanted, nothing, in which everything was beyond our abilities and power, had a part in this world, and thus also in the supreme, for books existed, you only had to read them, no one but myself could exclude me from them. You just had to reach up. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 2233994

The article said that Kevin Keegan was an extrovert while Kenny Dalglish was an introvert.
Just seeing the word introvert threw me into despair.
Was I an introvert?
Wasn't I?
Didn't I cry more than I laughed? Didn't I spend all my time reading in my room?
That was introverted behavior, wasn't it?
Introvert, introvert, I didn't want to be an introvert.
That was the last thing I wanted to be, there could be nothing worse.
But I was an introvert, and the insight grew like a kind of mental cancer within me.
Kenny Dalglish kept himself to himself.
Oh, so did I! But I didn't want that. I wanted to be an extrovert! An extrovert! — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 2219617

the intensity was so great that sometimes life felt almost unlivable, and when nothing could give me any peace of mind except books, with their different places, different times, and different people, where I was no one and no one was me. That — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 2057529

Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 2034560

I sat down on the sofa, strangely restless, it was as though the tempo inside me was greater than that outside. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1956692

This state lasted for six months, for six months I was truly happy, truly at home in this world and in myself before slowly it began to lose its luster, and once more the world moved out of my reach. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1930881

Sometimes I would hold it in for days so that I could have a really big one and also because it felt good in itself. When I really did have to shit, so much that I could barely stand upright but had to bend forward, I had such a fantastic feeling in my body if I didn't let nature take its course, if I squeezed the muscles in my butt together as hard as I could and, as it were, forced the shit back to where it came from. But this was a dangerous game, because if you did it too many times the turd ultimately grew so big it was impossible to shit it out. Oh Christ, how it hurt when such an enormous turd had to come out! It was truly unbearable, I was convulsed with pain, it was as if my body were exploding with pain, AAAAAAGGGHHH!! I screamed, OOOOOHHH, and then, just as it was at its very worst, suddenly it was out.
Oh, how good that was! — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1921356

What was it that Rilke wrote? That music raised him out of himself, and never returned him to where it had found him, but to a deeper place, somewhere in the unfinished. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1877209

I wandered beneath the sun-dappled shade from the trees, surrounded by the warm fragrances of the forest, thinking that I was in the middle of my life. Not life as an age, not halfway along life's path, but in the middle of my existence. My heart trembled. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1862577

with a mouth of lush church grass I stand at the crossroads drinking the light of faith on the shores of eternity I lead my body, on like a dun horse in the dusk toward the forest somewhere — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1859588

Everything has become intellect, even our bodies, they aren't bodies any more, but ideas of bodies, something that is situated in our own heaven of images and conceptions within us and above us, where an increasingly large part of our lives is lived. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1661464

If you really love me, you have to come to me without demands, I thought but didn't say, I wanted her to notice on her own. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1837299

I, a fervent anti-Christian from early teenage years and a materialist in my heart of hearts, had in one second, without any reflection, got to my feet, walked up the aisle and knelt in front of the altar. It had been pure impulse. And, meeting those glares, I had no defence, I couldn't say I was a Christian. I looked down, slightly ashamed. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1818969

I would have given a fortune to know what the people sitting there were thinking. What the world looked like to them. Imagine if it was radically different from what I saw. If it was full of pleasure at the dark leather of the sofa, the black surface of the coffee and its bitter taste, not to mention the yellow eye of custard in the center of the puff pastry's winding and cracked terrain. What if the whole of this world sang inside them? What if they were full to bursting with the many delights the day had bestowed on them? — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1766518

I clambered onto the rear seat and leaned back. Taxis, I loved taxis. Not the ones I came home drunk in, but the ones I caught to airports or railway stations. Was there anything better than sitting in the rear seat of a taxi and being driven through towns and suburbs before a long journey? — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1759582

You're organised, I can see,' I said.
'I'm organised in everything,' he said. 'Absolutely everything. There's nothing in my life that I have not planned or allowed for.'
'That sounds frightening,' I said and looked at him.
He smiled.
'For me it's frightening to meet someone who moves to Stockholm at one day's notice. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1226095

The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1737588

To have an outside where you've come from and an inside where you are going. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1736025

The music was linked with almost everything I had done, none of the records came without a memory. Everything that had happened in the last five years rose like steam from a cup when I played a record, not in the form of thoughts or reasoning, but as moods, openings, space. Some general, others specific. If my memories were stacked in a heap on the back of my life's trailer, music was the rope that held them together and kept it, my life, in position. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1731695

I had never been allowed to invite friends on my birthday, and nor was I on this one. I was sullen and surly, I ate the cake without a word ... — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 1668437

As your prospective of the world increases, not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules or atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large such as cloud formations, river deltas, cloud formations, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 552986

The heavens were inexhaustible, it had rained every day since the beginning of September and except for a couple of hours I hadn't seen the sun for what would soon be eight months. The streets were deserted apart from a few people who rushed past hugging the walls, in Bergen it was vital to get from A to B as fast as you could. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 780149

Why would someone with such red cheeks who liked to go on long walks in the forest have such a big cock? I wondered. What would he do with it? — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 773970

Children ate whole wheat pasta and whole wheat bread and all sorts of weird coarse-grained rice that their stomachs could not digest properly, but that didn't matter because it was "beneficial," it was "healthy," it was "wholesome. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 738120

But what we were best at, what we were really the kings of, that was buses and sitting around in bedrooms. No one could beat us at that. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 731255

At a table behind, a man was sitting with his knees pinched together and eating as if it were a punishment: for a few seconds his hand sped between the carton of fries, the small tub of ketchup and the chewing mouth, then he swallowed, grabbed the hamburger with both hands, put it to his lips and took a large bite. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 713817

The next day we moved my things, that is to say all my books, which had now grown to number two and a half thousand titles, a fact which Anders and Geir, who were helping me with the move, cursed from the bottom of their hearts as we shifted the boxes from the lift into the flat. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 684915

Now they're twenty-four and their real lives lie before them. Jobs of their own, a house of their own, children of their own. There are the two of them, and the future they are moving into is theirs, too.
Or is it? — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 622969

Shameless actually good since it gives a kind of freedom. We consider the old, functionless shame destructive. Today, if you have a strong sense of shame you also have a strong desire to overcome it. And that's when you can write. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 604139

Day in, day out! Wind and rain, sleet and snow, sun and storm, we did the same. We heard something on the grapevine, went there, came back, sat in his bedroom, heard something else, went by bus, bike, on foot, sat in someone's bedroom. In the summer we went swimming. That was it. What was it all about? We were friends, there was no more than that. And the waiting, that was life. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 568668

I was drunk in that pure joyful way you can be from white wine, when your thoughts collide with one another like bubbles and what emerges when they burst is pleasure. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 868201

Now it was ruined. That was what I wanted. And now it had happened. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 518361

They hung over the town, muted red, dark-pink, surrounded by every conceivable nuance of gray. The setting was wild and beautiful. Actually everyone should be in the streets, I thought, cars should be stopping, doors should be opened and drivers and passengers emerging with heads raised and eyes sparkling with curiosity and a craving for beauty, for what was it that was going on above our heads? However, a few glances at most were cast upward, perhaps followed by isolated comments about how beautiful the evening was, for sights like this were not exceptional, on the contrary, hardly a day passed without the sky being filled with fantastic cloud formations, each and every one illuminated in unique, never-to-be-repeated ways, and since what you see every day is what you never see, we lived our lives under the constantly changing sky without sparing it a glance or a thought. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 470447

What we never really comprehend, or don't want to comprehend, is that this happens outside us, that we ourselves have no part in it, that we are only that which grows and dies, as blind as the waves in the sea are blind. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 437946

I remember thinking all I wanted to do was to sit right there, in a newly built house, in a circle of light in the middle of the forest and be as stupid as I liked. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 432766

Literature is what words evoke in the reader. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 383772

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 is of no consequence. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 284228

Understanding must not be confused with knowledge for I knew next to nothing — Karl Ove Knausgard

Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes 213442

Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her 'b's. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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It is not the case that we are born equal and that the conditions of life make our lives unequal, it is the opposite, we are born unequal, and the conditions of life make our lives more equal. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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The problem is not so much that the world limits your imagination as your imagination limits the world. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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I haven't said anything about your novel yet,' he said, taking a seat on the other side of the table. 'But it made an indelible impression on me. I was deeply shaken after reading it.'
'Why's that?' I asked.
'Because you went so far. You went so unbelievably far. I was glad you did, I was sitting here, smiling, because you had brought it off. When we met you wanted to be a writer. No one else had had the idea. Only you. And then you achieved it. But that wasn't why I was shaken. It was because you went so far. Do you really have to go that far, I thought at the time. And it was frightening. Speaking for myself, I can't go that far.'
'What do you mean? How do you mean I went so far? It's just a standard novel.'
'You say things about yourself it's unheard of to say. Not least the story of the thirteen-year-old. I'd never have thought you would dare. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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Indifference is one of the seven deadly sins, actually the greatest
of them all, because it is the only one that sins against life. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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When I think of my three children it is not only their distinctive faces that appear before me, but also the quite distinct feeling they radiate. This feeling, which is constant, is what they "are" for me. And what they "are" has been present in them ever since the first day I saw them. At that time they could barely do anything, and the little bit they could do, like sucking on a breast, raising their arms as reflex actions, looking at their surroundings, imitating, they could all do that, thus what they "are" has nothing to do with qualities, has nothing to do with what they can or can't do, but is more a kind of light that shines within them. Their — Karl Ove Knausgard

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The doubts that colored such a large part of my thinking never applied to the larger picture but always the smaller, the one associated with my closer surroundings, friends, acquaintances, girls, who, I was convinced, always held a low opinion of me, considered me an idiot, which burned inside me, every day it burned inside me; however, as far as the larger picture was concerned, I never had any doubt that I could attain whatever I wanted, I knew I had it in me, because my yearnings were so strong and they never found any rest. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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I liked these short stories so much, but I couldn't write like this, I didn't have the imagination. I didn't have any imagination at all. Everything I wrote was connected to reality and my own experiences. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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If you are disappearing from yourself, but you're still writing, then there is a kind of activity of thinking going on, which in my world is similar to what's going on in music. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilise it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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Physics too is an interpretation of the world and an arrangement of the world, and not an explanation of the world," and that "we have measured the value of the world with categories that refer to a purely fabricated world. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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Off with my clothes, switch on the water, steaming hot, over my head, down my body.
Should i have a wank? — Karl Ove Knausgard

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The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing. Where this ideal has come from I have no idea, and as I now see it before me, in black and white, it almost seems perverse. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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Perhaps they were dead and imagined they were living? Perhaps everyone was dead? Perhaps he'd always been dead? That what he'd always assumed was life was actually death? — Karl Ove Knausgard

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... to sit alone in a bar chatting with strangers would have been inconceivable for me, it was closer to my nature to make waffles alone in my bedsit... — Karl Ove Knausgard

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Innocence and purity have become a symbol of stupidity, but that's
nowadays. We live in a culture where the person with the most experience wins. It's sick. Everyone knows which way modernism is going, you create a form by breaking up a form, in an endless regression; just let it continue, and for as long as it does, experience will have the upper hand. The unique feature of our times, the pure or independent act, is, as you know, to renounce, not to accept. Accepting is too easy. There's nothing to be achieved by it. That's more or less where I place you. Almost saint-like, in other words. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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If dogs can smell fear, girls can smell nervousness, that was my experience. From — Karl Ove Knausgard

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Before i going out i stood in such a way that i could see the face in the wooden flooring. and i was really Christ. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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I sipped the coffee and lit a cigarette. I can't say that I enjoyed the taste of coffee or the feeling of smoke descending into my lungs, I could barely distinguish the two, the point was to do it, it was a routine, and as with all routines, protocol was everything. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees me. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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When I came to a halt by my front door I looked at my watch.
It had taken me fifteen minutes to walk around the whole village.
So it was within these fifteen minutes I was to live my whole life this coming year. — Karl Ove Knausgard