Simen > Simen's Quotes

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.”
― leo tolstoy, War and Peace

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Kjære deg, la meg få skrevet dette før jeg brenner ned”
― Gaute Heivoll, Før jeg brenner ned

“Skammen er et fugleegg du kan gjemme i hjertet.”
― Gaute Heivoll, Drøm om de levende

“Jeg tenkte på Hanne. Det var som om hun hadde en plass i meg, at hun fantes som et faktisk sted, hvor jeg hele tiden ville være. At jeg faktisk kunne gå dit, når jeg ville, føltes som en nåde. Vi hadde sittet ute på svaberget og pratet på klassefesten den foregående natten. Ingenting hendte, det var bare det. Svaberget, Hanne, sundet med de lave holmene. Vi hadde danset, lekt, steget ned trappen fra bryggen og badet i mørket. Det hadde vært fantastisk. Og det fantastiske var uslitelig, det hadde levd i meg hele den dagen, og det levde i meg nå.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Hjertet mitt banket, for jeg stod ikke bare på bunnen av en skog med himmelen over meg langt der oppe, jeg stod også på bunnen av meg selv og så opp i noe lyst og åpent og lykkelig.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård

“But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’
Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History