The Morning Star

by Karl Ove Knausgård

Criticizing a person was the same as putting yourself above them, telling them you’re better than they are. There was no other way of looking at it.

But Nietzsche was impossible to read without consideration of the fact that he himself was a loser, weak and alone, and that everything he wrote about will, about power and about the strong, was to compensate for his own inadequacy.

I’d begun to realize that the ties that bind are inside a person, and that disconnecting from the external world was unlikely to make a difference.

What happens to the bird does not concern it. It was the most radical thought I had ever known. It would free me from all pain, all suffering. What happens to me does not concern me.

We are just as unnecessary as death, and however odd it may sound, our presence here is more closely attached to death than to life. Death created us. —