Karl Ove Knausgård Quotes

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“And it's a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

All my adult life I have kept a distance from other people, it has been my way of coping, because I become so incredibly close to others in my thoughts and feelings of course, they only have to look away dismissively for a storm to break inside me.

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“There is only one thing children find harder to hold back than tears, and that is joy.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

I feel almost physically ill in the presence of boring people who consider themselves especially interesting and who blow their own trumpets.

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“How desperate do you have to be to start doing push-ups to solve your problems?”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“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 KnausgÃ¥rd

“When the wave, equally suddenly, retreated, it left a void which resembled that of the morning, yet had a character of its own, because though the pattern was repeated it was in reverse order: the scattered schoolchildren who passed my window now were on their way home and there was something unrestrained and boisterous about them, whereas when they had walked past on their way to school in the morning they still bore the silent imprint of sleep and the innate wariness we feel toward things that have not yet begun.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

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 KnausgÃ¥rd

“Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if not young, then somehow transcend the time that otherwise marks the face. It is as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“Writing is more about destroying than creating (195).”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“The past is now barely present in my thoughts. I believe the main reason for that is our children, since life with them in the here and now occupies all the space. They even squeeze out the most recent past: Ask me what I did three days ago and I can't remember. Ask me what Vanja was like two years ago, Heidi two months ago, John two weeks ago, and I can't remember. A lot happens in our little 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.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“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.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

I walked around Stockholm's streets, modern and feminized, with a furious nineteenth-century man inside me.

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“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 KnausgÃ¥rd

“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 KnausgÃ¥rd

The other guests clapped. I sat down again, full of disgust for myself, because even though losing control of my emotions made a good impression and gave extra emphasis to what I had said, I was ashamed that I had revealed such weakness.

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“Taxis, I loved taxis. Not the ones I came home drunk in, but the ones I caught to airports or railway stations.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

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 KnausgÃ¥rd

“But now he was married and had children, and even though he still had the boat the aura of island romanticism had gone. The long hair too.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

Even though the suitcase was heavy I carried it by the handle as I walked into the departure hall. I detested the tiny wheels, first of all because they were feminine, thus not worthy of a man, a man should carry, not roll, secondly because they suggested easy options, shortcuts, savings, rationality, which I despised and opposed wherever I could, even where it was of the most trivial significance. Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight? Were we just images? And what were we actually saving energy for with these energy-saving devices?

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“All I needed to know, all true knowledge, the only really essential knowledge, was to be found in the books I read and the music I listened to”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“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 KnausgÃ¥rd

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 KnausgÃ¥rd

“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 KnausgÃ¥rd

“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 KnausgÃ¥rd

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

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“Was it the shrill, sickly tone I heard everywhere that I couldn't stand, the one that arose from all the pseudo people and pseudo places, pseudo events and pseudo conflicts our lives passed through, that which we saw but did not participate in, and the distance that modern life in this way had opened up to our own, actually inalienable here and now?”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“I stopped for a few seconds by the newspaper stand wondering whether to buy the two evening papers here, the two biggest publications. Reading them was like emptying a bag of trash over your head.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“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 KnausgÃ¥rd

“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 KnausgÃ¥rd

“Stendhal wrote that music was the highest form of art and that all the other forms really wanted to be music. This was of course a Platonic idea, all the other art forms depict something else, music is the only one that is something in itself, it was absolutely incomparable.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“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 KnausgÃ¥rd

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 KnausgÃ¥rd

“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 KnausgÃ¥rd

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 KnausgÃ¥rd

The life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it, and always had done. 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 KnausgÃ¥rd

“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 KnausgÃ¥rd

Now it was ruined. That was what I wanted. And now it had happened.

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“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 KnausgÃ¥rd

“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.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“Nevertheless I have more than enough information to know his mood. This is apparent not from his facial expressions but his physical posture, and you do not read it with your mind but with your intuition.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“The difference between this painting and the others the late Rembrandt painted is the difference between seeing and being seen. That is, in this picture he sees himself seeing while also being seen, and no doubt it was only in the Baroque period with its penchant for mirrors within mirrors, the play within the play, staged scenes and a belief in the interdependence of all things, when moreover craftsmanship attained heights witnessed neither before nor since, that such a painting was possible. But it exists in our age, it sees for us.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“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 KnausgÃ¥rd

“Who cares about politics when there are flames licking at your insides?”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

I scored a goal!" I said.
"Oh, great!" Mom said.
When we returned home and I was sitting at the kitchen table to eat supper, I said it again.
"I scored today!"
"Was it a match?" Yngve said.
"No," I said. "We haven't had any matches yet. It was training."
"Then it means nothing," he said.
A couple of tears detached themselves and rolled down my cheeks. Dad looked at me with that stern, annoyed expression of his.
"For Christ's sake, you can't cry about THAT!" he said. "There must be SOMETHING you can take without blubbering!"
By then the tears were in full flow.

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

Attending a poetry reading is like being in a hospital," he said as we left the next station. "Full of neuroses.

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

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 KnausgÃ¥rd

“The sole really unpredictable factor in this life, from autumn to winter, spring to summer, from one school year to the next, was Dad. I was so frightened of him that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to recreate the fear; the feelings I had for him I have never felt since, nor indeed anything close.
His footsteps on the stairs - was he coming to see me?
The wild glare in his eyes. The tightness around his mouth. The lips that parted involuntarily. And then his voice.
Sitting here now, hearing it in my inner ear, I almost start crying.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd