The Wolves of Eternity Quotes

“And that the death we carry within us, which Rilke compares to a fruit, grows inside us until ripe, and is in other words alive, belonging to life itself.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel

“Yes. What I haven’t made sense of yet, I never will.’ ‘You’re more right than you know,’ he said. ‘But that’s something you won’t understand until you’re my age.’ ‘Understand what?’ ‘That we never get older, not really. It just looks that way. Inside, we’re still nineteen, all of us.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel

“Thus, Fyodorov suggests, at some point in time it will be possible to trace every atom that once belonged to a person and to put them all together again.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel

“Nearness is undemanding and therefore unproductive in a way. What we know is near to us – no effort required. What we don’t know is remote from us, at a distance, we’re not in the same place as what we don’t know, and so we have to traverse that distance in order to learn. Longing requires distance – longing for another place, another state, another person, another set of things we know – and if there’s one thing that drives us, individually and collectively, it’s longing.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity

“It’s important to distinguish between information and knowledge,”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel

“Different animals inhabit radically different realities, as do different insects, plants and trees,”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel

“you filmed that, an injured or sick animal that crept away to hide, died and rotted, and then ran that film backwards, the soil would pull apart to become an animal that rose up and slunk away. If you could do the same with the forest itself, the soil would pull apart everywhere, as if under a bombardment, and animals would rise up and slink away wherever you looked.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel

“Why not rise up against it? Why not crush death, that great oppressor? Why not organise a revolution of life? Why not let our dead be the last to be dead, and from now on become the eternally living? Yes, I know: impossible. But what if it isn’t?”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel

“The mistake we have made is that we have submitted to death, accepting it passively and without question. What we must do is to intervene actively in nature: steer it, control it, conquer it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel

“Nature is a destructive force we permit to control us. Death is a result of our passivity towards nature: we allow nature to kill us.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel

“Romanticism is for the one, the individual, and is vertical. Romanticism is a matter between you and God, whereas Shostakovich, now that we’ve mentioned him, and in fact his name suggests itself here, is horizontal, complex, alive.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel