Min kamp 5 Quotes

“Go somewhere you know nothing about and see what happens.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“There was also something panicked about my desire to acquire knowledge, in sudden terrible insights I saw that actually I didn’t know anything and it was urgent, I didn’t have a second to lose. It was almost impossible to adapt this urgency to the slowness that reading required.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 5

“I was a wannabe who was actually unable to write because I had nothing to say, who wasn’t honest enough with himself to draw the appropriate conclusions and was therefore trying to get a foot in the world of literature at any cost. Not as someone who created something himself, someone who wrote and was published, but as a parasite, as someone who wrote as others wrote, a second-rater.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“I had gained an insight. At great expense, but it was real and important: I was not a writer. What writers had, I did not have. I fought against this insight, I told myself I might be able to have what writers had, it might be attainable provided I persisted for long enough, while knowing in fact this was only a consolation. - Karl Ove Knausgaard, after his year at the Bergen Writing Academy”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“The heart is always right. It never errs. The heart never errs. The heart never ever errs.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Min kamp 5

“I sat down on the sofa, strangely restless, it was as though the tempo inside me was greater than that outside.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“Actually there were only two forms of existence, I reflected: one that was tied to a place and one that wasn't. Both had always existed. Neither could be chosen.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“In the mist, in the darkness of the forest, in the dewdrops on the spruce needles. In the whales that swam in the sea, in the heart beating in my breast. Mist, heart, blood, trees. Why were they so appealing? What was it that enticed me with such power? That filled me with such enormous desire? Mist, heart, blood, trees. Oh, if only I could write about them, no, not write about them but make my writing be them, then I would be happy. Then I would have peace of mind.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“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 Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 5

“This was my life now. I was twenty-one years old, doing the first year of a literature course, I had a stranger living next door to me, I had a friend I still didn't really know on the floor beneath and a girlfriend. I knew nothing, but I was still getting better and better at pretending I did.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“There was something panicked about my desire to acquire knowledge, in sudden terrible insights I saw that actually I didn't know anything and it was urgent, I didn't have a second to lose. It was almost impossible to adapt this urgency to the the slowness that reading required.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“Mood isn't a particular thought or a particular part of the brain, nor in a particular part of the body, such as a foot or an ear, it is everywhere, but nothing in itself, more like a colour in which thoughts are thought, a colour through which the world is seen.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Min kamp 5

“Writing was a defeat, it was a humiliation, it was coming face-to-face with yourself and seeing you weren't good enough.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“For a writer it was perhaps most important not to write, but to read. Read as much as you can because in so doing you won't lose yourselves, become unoriginal, what happens is the opposite, by doing this you'll find yourselves. The more you read, the better.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“I liked these short stories so much, but I couldn’t write like this, I didn’t have the imagination. I didn’t have any imagination at all. Everything I wrote was connected to reality and my own experiences.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“I asked him whether he was still with the woman he had met, whose name I didn’t even know.
‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘She told me where to put my shoes. That’s no good.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“There were two things that particularly bothered me in those days. One was that I came too fast, often before anything had happened at all, and the other was that I never laughed. That is, it did happen once in a while, maybe once every six months, when I would be overcome by the hilarity of something and just laugh and laugh, but that was always unpleasant because then I completely lost control, I was unable to regain my composure, and I didn’t like showing that side of myself to others. So basically I was able to laugh, I had the capacity, but in my everyday life, in social situations, when I was with people around a table chatting, I never laughed. I had lost that ability. To make up for this, I smiled a lot, I might also emit some laughter-like sounds, so I don’t think anyone noticed or found it conspicuous. But I knew: I never laughed. As a result, I became especially conscious of laughter as such, as a phenomenon — I noticed how it occurred, how it sounded, what it was. People laughed almost all the time, they said something, laughed, others said something, everyone laughed. It lubricated conversations or gave them a shot of something else which didn’t have so much to do with what was being said as with being together with others. People meeting. In this situation everyone laughed, each in their own way, of course, and sometimes because of something genuinely funny, in which case the laughter lasted longer and could at times completely take over, but also for no apparent reason at all, just as a token of friendliness or openness. It could conceal insecurity, I knew that well, but it could also be strong and generous, a helping hand. When I was small I laughed a lot, but at some point it stopped, perhaps as early as the age of twelve, at any rate I remember there was a film with Rolv Wesenlund that filled me with horror, it was called The Man Who Could Not Laugh, and it was probably when I heard about it that I realised actually I didn’t laugh. From then on, all social situations were something I took part in and watched from the outside as I lacked what they were full of, the interpersonal link: laughter.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“The cemetery’s full of irreplaceable people, as Einar Førde once said.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 5

“She was different, something else, and the odd thing was that I also became different and something else when thinking about her. I liked myself better when I thought about her. It was as though thinking about her erased something in me, and that gave me a fresh start or moved me on.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle, Book 5

“I felt the impact of time, it came like a blow, and even though I knew that changes happened gradually, that moment crept up on me, when what had been behind me, a long time behind me, suddenly felt like a thing of the past. That past was real, it wasn’t unreal, it wasn’t dead, but it was behind me, further and further, in other words, I was growing old.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Min kamp 5

“I received a request from Kritikkjournalen to review a novel by a Japanese writer by the name of Murakami, the book was about someone hunting special sheep, and I slated it, mainly because it was so western.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“I would soon be twenty-four and in the last few years my life had stood still, I hadn't developed in any direction, hadn't done anything new, I had only continued the pattern that had formed during the first few months in Bergen. When I looked around me now, I saw no openings anywhere, just more of the same everywhere. National service came heaven sent. It gave me sixteen months to defer decisions. Everything would be decided for me for more than a year, I wouldn't have any responsibility for my life, at least not that part to do with studies, work and career.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“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.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“Was art only an inner phenomenon? Something that moved within us and between us, all that we couldn't see but marked us, indeed which was us? Was this the function of landscape painting, portraits, sculptures, to draw the external world, so essentially alien to us, into our inner world?”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“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.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“It was such a terrible time. I knew so little, had such ambitions and achieved nothing. But what spirits I was in before I went!”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Min kamp 5

“Life was a game, a pastime, and death: it didn't exist. We laughed at everything, even at death, and that wasn't completely wrong, laughter always had the last word, the skull's grin when one day we lay there with earth in our mouths.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“Writing isn't black magic. You just have to come up with an idea...”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“... me silent, serious, tormented by the thought that I was silent and serious. Especially together with Bendik, who chatted and laughed non-stop and was the type to say whatever came into his mind.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5

“Dear Karl Ove Knausgård,

Thank you for sending me your contribution. I read it with interest, but I am afraid I cannot use it in SIGNALER 89.
Best regards,
Lars Saabye Christensen

It gave me a little frisson of excitement to see Saabye Christensen’s signature, it meant he had read what I had written. For a few minutes at any rate I had filled his mind with what existed in mine!”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5