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Famous Karl Ove Knausgård Quotes

“Το ότι συγχρόνως υπήρχε και κάτι ουσιαστικά γελοίο σ' αυτό που συνέβαινε, δηλαδή ένα πλήθος από άντρες που κάθονταν με κατεβασμένα τα βρακιά ως τα γόνατα, ο καθένας στο θάλαμό του, βογκώντας και μουγκρίζοντας και τραβώντας το πέος τους πάνω κάτω, ενώ έβλεπαν ταινίες με γυναίκες που κάνανε σεξ με άλογα ή με σκυλιά, ή άντρες με πλήθος άλλους άντρες, δεν μπορούσαν να μην το βλέπουν, αλλά ούτε και να το λάβουνε υπόψη τους, καθότι ο γνήσιος πόθος και το γνήσιο γέλιο είναι ασυμβίβαστα πράγματα, κι αυτό που τους οδηγούσε εκεί ήταν ο πόθος. Όμως, γιατί ειδικά εκεί; Όλες οι ταινίες που μπορούσες να δεις εκεί, υπήρχαν και στο ίντερνετ και μπορούσες να τις δεις τελείως μόνος, χωρίς κίνδυνο να σε δουν άλλοι. Οπότε λοιπόν έπρεπε να υπάρχει κάτι σ' αυτήν την ανομολόγητη κατάσταση που έψαχναν να βιώσουν. Ήταν το ανήθικο, αναξιοπρεπές και βρώμικο της όλης υπόθεσης ή το κλειστό από όλους τους άλλους".”

DesireSexLaughterSexualityLustPornographyCravingMasturbationSexualPornSexuality QuotesPornography AddictionPorn AddictionMasturbatingPorn Moviesίντερνεταστείοαυνανισμόςγέλιοεπιθυμίακωμικόπορνογραφίαπορνόπόθοςσεξτσόντα
Book:Min kamp 1
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“Av jord var de kommet, til jord skulle de bli, og i de få årene livet levde i dem, var det fra jorden det hentet sin kraft. Den eneste veien ut av det, var lenger inn i det. Lavt er pliktens himmel hvelvet, men det er en himmel. Under den gikk Lamek, og der fant han sin mening. Denne meningen hadde en fiende, det var lengselen etter noe annet, og den bekjempet han med det eneste middelet han kjente: mer arbeid. Arbeidet var således både flukten, og det han flyktet fra.”

WorkDutyMeaningKnausgaard
Book:A Time for Everything
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“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.”

NatureBeautyHuman NatureAppearances
Author:Karl Ove Knausgård
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“Yes, we were good at using the grapevine. 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. None of this led anywhere. Well, we probably weren’t very good at doing things that led somewhere. We didn’t have particularly good conversations, no one could say we did, the few topics we had developed so slowly we ourselves assumed they had nowhere to go; not one of us was a brilliant guitarist, although that is what we would have loved to be, more than anything else, and as far as girls were concerned, it was rare we came across one who wouldn’t object if we pulled up her jumper so that we could lower our heads and kiss her nipples. These were great moments. They were luminous shafts of grace in our world of yellowing grass, grey muddy ditches and dusty country roads. Yes, that was how it was for me. I assumed it was the same for him. What was this all about? Why did we live like this? Were we waiting for something? In which case, how did we manage to be so patient? For nothing ever happened! Nothing happened! It was always the same. 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.”

Life And Living
Author:Karl Ove Knausgård
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“She had never done anything bad to me. She had been good for me, always wanting the best for me. She had no defects, flaws or shortcomings. She wanted only good and she did good. The defects, flaws and shortcomings were all mine. I tried as hard as I could to hide them from her, and I was usually successful, but it was always there, inside me, a shadow I cast, and it gave me a bad conscience. I wanted to be out of this, I wanted to be alone, then it would disappear as it wouldn't affect anyone else, I would be left with it. But to be alone I would have to leave her, finish what she had invested so much in and where, in a way, I too had invested so much. She often told me she loved me, and I didn't want to hurt her, not for anything in the world, I didn't want to turn away from her, from someone who loved me so much.”

LoveRelationshipGirlfriend
Book:Min kamp 5
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“When I was with her it was as though something was being drawn out of me. The darkness became lighter, the crippled straighter, and the strange thing was that it didn't come from outside, it wasn't that she lit the darkness, no, it was something that happened inside me because I saw myself with her eyes, and not just my own, and in her eyes there was nothing wrong with me, quite the contrary. In this way the balance shifted. When I was with her I no longer wished to do myself any harm.”

LoveSelfLoversIn Love
Book:Min kamp 5
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“For a long time I took a purely theological standpoint on the issue, which is actually so fundamental that it can be used as a springboard for any debate – if environment is the operative factor, for example, if man at the outset is both equal and shapeable and the good man can be shaped by engineering his surroundings, hence my parents’ generation’s belief in the state, the education system and politics, hence their desire to reject everything that had been and hence their new truth, which is not found within man’s inner being, in his detached uniqueness, but on the contrary in areas external to his intrinsic self, in the universal and collective, perhaps expressed in its clearest form by Dag Solstad, who has always been the chronicler of his age, in a text from 1969 containing his famous statement “We won’t give the coffee pot wings”: out with spirituality, out with feeling, in with the new materialism, but it never struck them that the same attitude could lie behind the demolition of old parts of town to make way for roads and parking lots, which naturally the intellectual Left opposed, and perhaps it has not been possible to be aware of this until now when the link between the idea of equality and capitalism, the welfare state and liberalism, Marxist materialism and the consumer society is obvious because the biggest equality creator of all is money, it levels all differences, and if your character and your fate are entities that can be shaped, money is the most natural shaper, and this gives rise to the fascinating phenomena whereby crowds of people assert their individuality and originality by shopping in an identical way while those who ushered all this in with their affirmation of equality, their emphasis on material values and belief in change, are now inveighing against their own handiwork, which they believed the enemy created, but like all simple reasoning this is not wholly true either, life is not a mathematical quantity, it has no theory, only practice, and though it is tempting to understand a generation’s radical rethink of society as being based on its view of the relationship between heredity and environment, this temptation is literary and consists more in the pleasure of speculating, that is, of weaving one’s thoughts through the most disparate areas of human activity, than in the pleasure of proclaiming the truth.”

SocialMoneyCapitalism
Book:Min kamp 2
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“All day flashes of happiness swept through me. Something fantastic had happened. We had chatted a bit, that was all. For a year she had worked here, for a year I had seen her going to and fro, and she had seen me. I had never felt any of what I felt now. Not once, not even close. Then we had met at a party, smiled at each other - and that was that? Yes that was that. How was it possible? How could it change everything? Because everything was changed, I knew that. My heart told me. And the heart is never wrong. The heart is never ever wrong.”

LoveDreamTwentiesFalling In LoveInfatuationAnima
Book:Min kamp 5
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“I saw her in front of me and a wave of happiness and sorrow rose within me. How was this going to turn out? How was it going to turn out? I hadn't eaten all day, and I couldn't get anything down at home either, I wasn't interested and food didn't seem necessary. I was burning up. For the 2 hours before I could leave I wandered around, lay down on my bed, stared at the ceiling, got up and paced to and fro. It was terrible, I was so high that all I could possible expect now was a fall.”

LoveDreamInfatuationIn LoveAnima
Book:Min kamp 5
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“It would be so much easier to give up, to say a cold goodbye and not contact her again. All the problems, all the pain, all the defeats would finish there. But I couldn't. She stood up, it was late, time to go home, I accompanied her to the door, said bye, watched her go, she walked up the hill without turning. When I went back down I put on 'Siamese Dream' again, lay back on the bed and let my mind fill with thoughts of her”

LoveGirlTwentiesInfatuationAnima
Book:Min kamp 5
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“In themselves pictures are beyond words, beyond concepts, beyond thought, they invoke the presence of the world on the world's terms, which also means that everything that has been thought and written in this book stops being valid the moment your gaze meets the canvas.”

WorldArtPaintingThoughtsConceptsWordsThoughtCanvasConceptPictures
Book:Så mye lengsel på så liten flate. En bok om Edvard Munchs bilder
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“I think all cultural epochs are characterised by these two modes, the existence of a future and the absence of a future, and the strange thing is that culture seems to strive towards the absence of future, as if that were the highest form, when all longings have been fulfilled, but it isn't, because then longing turns towards the past, or towards something else that has been lost or was never accomplished.”

RegretLonging
Book:Om vinteren
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“In the streets outside everything was still. The hour before five was the only time of day this city slept. In my earlier life, during the twelve years I had lived in Bergen I used to stay up at night as often as I could. I never reflected on this, it was just something I liked and did. It had started as a student ideal, grounded in a notion that in some way night was associated with freedom. Not in itself but as a response to the nine-to-four reality which I, and a couple of others, regarded as middle-class and conformist. We wanted to be free, we stayed up at night. Continuing with this had less to do with freedom than a growing need to be alone. This, I understood now, I shared with my father. In the house where we lived he had a whole studio apartment to himself and he spent more or less every evening there. The night was his.”

NightLonelinessSolitude
Author:Karl Ove Knausgård
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“Nostalgia is an illness, but it belongs to the person through whom time is filtered, unpredictably and individually, with all the flaws and defects inherent in human beings. The era that had passed is located in pockets of consciousness, some hidden and unseen, like ponds in remote forests, some bright and familiar like houses on the forest edge, but all of them fragile and changeable, and they die when consciousness dies.”

LifeDeathPerspectiveMemoryNostalgia
Book:Min kamp 6
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“Every single moment of life stands open in several directions, it is as if it had three or seven doors, as in a fairy tail, into rooms that all contain different futures. These hypothetical offshoots of time cease to exist whenever we make a choice, and have never existed in themselves, a little like the unknown faces we see in dreams. While the past is lost forever, everything that didn't happen in it is doubly lost. This creates a particular kind of feeling of loss, the melancholy of an unrealised past. The feeling sounds overwrought and unnecessary, something to fill our idle and sheltered souls, but it is founded on a fundamentally human insight and longing: everything could have been different.”

Regret
Book:Om vinteren
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“Who I am to them I have no idea, probably a vague memory of someone they once knew in their childhood years, for they have done so much to one another in their lives since then, so much has happened and with such impact that the small incidents that took place in their childhoods have no more gravity than the dust stirred up by a passing car, or the seeds of a withering dandelion dispersed by the breath from a small mouth. And oh, wasn't the latter a fine image, of how event after event is dispersed in the air above the little meadow of one's own history, only to fall between the blades of grass and vanish?”

PeopleChildhoodMy StruggleKarl Ove KnausgaardKarl Ove KnausgårdMin Kamp
Book:Min kamp 3
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“The smooth, flat rocks were exactly the same, the sea pounded down on them in the same way, and also the landscape under the water, with its small valleys and bays and steep chasms and slopes, strewn with starfish and sea urchins, crabs and fish, was the same. You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyrolia bindings and Koflach boots. 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. A pair of Le Coq soccer boots was just a pair of soccer boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn’t, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.”

ChildhoodMemory
Author:Karl Ove Knausgård
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“I am alive, I have my own children and with them I have tried to achieve only one aim: that they shouldn’t be afraid of their father. They aren’t. I know that. When I enter a room, they don’t cringe, they don't look down at the floor, they don’t dart off as soon as they glimpse an opportunity, no, if they look at me, it is not a look of indifference, and if there is anyone I am happy to be ignored by it is them. If there is anyone I am happy to be taken for granted by, it is them. And should they have completely forgotten I was there when they turn forty themselves, I will thank them and take a bow and accept the bouquets.”

PeopleFatherFatherhoodFathersMy StruggleKarl Ove KnausgaardKarl Ove KnausgårdMin Kamp
Book:Min kamp 3
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“Was it Jesus you saw a picture of?” he says and looks up at me. If it had not been for the friendly voice and the long pause before the question, I would have thought he was making fun of me. He finds it a little embarrassing that I am a Christian; all he wants is for me not to be different from the other kids, and of all the kids in the neighbourhood, his youngest son is the only one to call himself a Christian. But he is really wondering about this. I feel a flutter of joy because he actually cares, and at the same time I become a bit offended that he underestimates me like that. I shake my head. “It wasn’t Jesus,” I say.”

LifeMy StruggleKarl Ove KnausgaardKarl Ove KnausgårdMin KampKnausgaardA Death In The Family
Book:Min kamp 1
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“But the moment I was alone others meant nothing to me. It wasn't that I disliked them, or nurtured feelings of loathing for them; on the contrary, I liked most of them, and the ones I didn't actually like I could always see some worth in, some attribute I could identify with, or at least find interesting, something which could occupy my mind for the moment. But liking them was not the same as caring about them. It was the social situation that bound me, the people within it did not.”

PeopleKarl Ove KnausgaardKarl Ove KnausgårdKnausgaardKnausgård
Book:Min kamp 2
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“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. Later, in his notebooks, I read about the Christmas when he called from the Canary Islands and the weeks that followed. 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.”

LoveFamilySonParentingFatherhoodDejectionPaternityPaternal Love
Book:Min kamp 4
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“O outono é uma passagem, um tempo de esvaziamento: da luz no céu, do calor no ar, das folhas nas árvores e plantas. O inverno que se segue é um estado, nele é a imobilidade que impera. A terra endurece, a água gela, a neve cobre o chão. Que este estado por vezes se represente como um rei, deve-se talvez à sensação de que a imobilidade é algo imposto, algo que vem de fora e que é imposto pela força à paisagem.”

TempoInvernoFrio
Book:Om vinteren
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“As your perspective 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 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 stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. 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 that is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty... Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning. My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.”

LifeAgingParents
Book:Min kamp 1
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“Als je de vijftig nadert en je op een rijtje gaat zetten wie van de mensen die je kent of over wie je hebt gehoord het slecht vergaan is, is dat heel heftig, het lijkt alsof het leven een harde en vreugdeloze beproeving is die niet veel mensen doorstaan zonder in het duister te worden neergedrukt. Maar zo is het niet, omdat de opsomming geen rekening houdt met de tijd, die enorme zee van dagen en nachten die alle gebeurtenissen verdunt en die constant expandeert en groter wordt. Iedere opsomming vertekent de werkelijkheid, en dat wat wij als ons leven zien, waarin de beslissende gebeurtenissen elkaar snel opvolgen, staat in verhouding tot de werkelijkheid als een kaart tot het terrein, of de sterren tot de sterrenhemel: van hier af lijkt de afstand ertussen heel klein, van hier af zijn ze net een school haringen, zo dicht als de sterren op elkaar zitten, maar als je erheen zou kunnen reizen, zou je begrijpen dat de waarheid over het heelal de ruimte ertussen is.”

Tijd
Book:Om våren
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“Our days are open and transparent, but enveloped too by the faintest membrane of time, almost imperceptible when our gaze passes through it to consider a single day on its own. But come another day, and another after that, the membrane will thicken, that which before was as clear as day will then be blurred and faintly obscured; come yet more and only the outlines will be perceptible, until they too recede and dissolve, and what happened inside them will then be hidden from us, sealed away by time.”

TimeMemoryForgetting The PastHuman Fallibility Error War
Book:The School of Night
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“One night I had been listening to [Goo], downstairs with Espen, we had been smoking hash, and I was lost in the music, literally, I saw it as rooms and corridors, floors and walls, ditches and slopes, small forests between apartment blocks and railway lines, and didn't emerge from it until the song stopped, it was like drawing breath because the next minute a new song started and I was caught again.”

LiteratureMusicSonic Youth
Book:Min kamp 5
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