Min kamp 6 Quotes

“Geir gave me the chance to look at life and understand it, Linda gave me the chance to live it. In the first instance I became visible to myself, in the second I vanished. That’s the difference between friendship and love.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day I would look back on my life, and this would be what I looked back on. What then had been insignificant, as weightless as air, a series of events dissolving in exactly the same way as the darkness dissolved in the mornings, would twenty years on seem laden with destiny and fate.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“I thought about something Vanja often asked, about why grown-ups never played. She couldn’t grasp that we found it tedious, and the conclusion she drew was that in that case she never wanted to grow up.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“Beauty is a problem in that it imparts a kind of hope.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 6

“To protect ourselves we use the most potent marker of distance we know, the line of demarcation that passes between ‘we’ and ‘they’. The Nazis have become our great ‘they’. In their demonic and monstrous evil ‘they’ exterminated the Jews and set the world aflame. Hitler, Goebels, Goering and Himmler, Mengele, Stangl and Eichmann. The German people who followed ‘them’ are in our minds also ‘they’, a faceless and frenzied mass, almost as monstrous as their leaders. The remoteness of ‘they’ is vast and dashes down these proximate historical events, which took place in the present of our grandparents, into a near-medieval abyss. At the same time we know, every one of us knows, even though we might not acknowledge it, that we ourselves, had we been a part of that time and place and not of this, would in all probability have marched beneath the banners of Nazism. In Germany in 1938 Nazism was the consensus. It was what was right, and who would dare to speak against what is right? The great majority of us believe the same as everyone else, do the same as everyone else, and this is to become the ‘we’ and the ‘all’ are what decide the norms, rules and morals of society. Now that Nazism has become ‘they’, it is easy to distance ourselves from it, but this was not the case what Nazism was ‘we’. If we are to understand what happened and how it was possible, we must understand this first.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 6

“It was if I had been shut away inside myself, alone with frustration, a dark and monstrous demon, which at some point had grown enormous, and as if there was no way out. Ever-decreasing circles. Greater and greater darkness. Not the existential kind of darkness that was all about life and death, overarching happiness or overarching grief, but the smaller kind, the shadow on the soul, the ordinary man’s private little hell, so inconsequential as to barely deserve mention, while at the same time engulfing everything.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 6

“Style is little more than self-awareness,”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“Now that Nazism has become “they,” it is easy to distance ourselves from it, but this was not the case when Nazism was “we.” If we are to understand what happened and how it was possible, we must understand this first. And we must understand too that Nazism in its various elements was not monstrous in itself, by which I mean that it did not arise as something obviously monstrous and evil, separate from all else in the current of society, but was on the contrary part of that current. The gas chambers were not a German invention, but were conceived by Americans who realized that people could be put to death by placing them in a chamber infused with poisonous gas, a procedure they carried out for the first time in 1919. Paranoid anti-Semitism was not a German phenomenon either, the world’s most celebrated and passionate anti-Semite in 1925 being not Adolf Hitler but Henry Ford. And racial biology was not an abject, shameful discipline pursued at the bottom of society or its shabby periphery, it was the scientific state of the art, much as genetics is today, haloed by the light of the future and all its hope. Decent humans distanced themselves from all of this, but they were few, and this fact demands our consideration, for who are we going to be when our decency is put to the test? Will we have the courage to speak against what everyone else believes, our friends, neighbors, and colleagues, to insist that we are decent and they are not? Great is the power of the we, almost inescapable its bonds, and the only thing we can really do is to hope our we is a good we. Because if evil comes it will not come as “they,” in the guise of the unfamiliar that we might turn away without effort, it will come as “we.” It will come as what is right.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“Nostalgia is an illness, but it belongs to the person through whom time is filtered, unpredictably and individually, with all the flaws and defects inherent in human beings. The era that had passed is located in pockets of consciousness, some hidden and unseen, like ponds in remote forests, some bright and familiar like houses on the forest edge, but all of them fragile and changeable, and they die when consciousness dies.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 6

“The name has always occupied a space between the concrete and the abstract, the individual and the social, but when it begins to be shaped and charged with meaning in places removed from the physical world, in that way entertaining the world of fiction, albeit unseen by the majority, at the same time as this fictional world is expanding and taking up an ever greater part of our lives - the TV screens are now not only in our own rooms, but also on the walls of our trains and under the luggage bins of our planes, in the waiting rooms of our doctors' offices and the halls of our banks, even in the supermarkets, quite apart from our carrying them around in the form of laptop computers and cell phones, in such a way that we inhabit two realities, one abstract and image-based, in which all kinds of people and places present themselves before us with nothing in common but being somewhere other than where we are, and one concrete, physical, which is the one we move around in and are more palpably a part of - when we arrive at a point where everything is either fiction or seen as fiction, the job of the novelist can no longer be to write more fiction.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 6

“which, regardless of all else, always broke down his inner dreams by confronting them with external reality, presenting to him, in other words, their real-world consequences. Our internal existence is abstract, external reality tangible, and in these grand yet unrealistic designs the two aspects collide in a way he is unable”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, The End

“Geir gave me the chance to look at life and understand it, Linda gave me the chance to live it. In the first instance I became visible to myself, in the second I vanished. That's the difference between friendship and love.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Min kamp 6

“Why do I organize my life like this? What do I want with this neutrality? Obviously it is to eliminate as much resistance as possible, to make the days slip past as easily and unobtrusively as possible. But why? Isn't that synonymous with wanting to live as little as possible? With telling life to leave me in peace so that I can... yes, well, what? Read? Oh, but come on, what do I read about, if not life? Write? Same thing. I read and write about life. The only thing I don't want life for is to live it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 6

“no longer anything bigger than ourselves, no”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, The End

“When she came back that afternoon and we cooked and ate as usual it felt as if we had lived through a year in the past two days. I was utterly exhausted, she was too, but at the same time something trembled inside me, and I knew that feeling, it was happiness. Whenever I felt myself tremble like this I tried to repress it, for if there is one thing I had learned in the forty years I’d been alive it was that it was so much easier to carry despair than hope.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“When we got married, in the spring of 2007, the wedding had been as minimal as it was possible to make it. Linda’s maid of honour Helena, my best man Geir and his girlfriend Christina, Linda’s mother Ingrid and my mother Sissel. Five people attended our wedding in the town hall, lasting two minutes, plus Vanja and Heidi. An hour later only five people sat around the table we had booked in Västra Hammen and ate with us. No speeches, no dancing, no fuss. That was how I wanted it, I hated being the centre of attention, even with people I knew.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 6

“All the freedom there was in the first four to five years of life, which I had done my best to restrict, had stopped, now there was a new consciousness, and the complexity of the relationships grew. I knew that none of this was important in itself, it was all arbitrary, but she didn’t, for hew this was everything. She was entering a system and didn’t know she was.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 6

“An ordinary travel agency took care of the practicalities of chartering trains in exactly the same way as they dealt with such matters normally. Ordinary railway staff were deployed to organise the logistics of the transport, plotting train times into schedules, passing information on through the system. The camps were built, personnel received their orders, the industry began. Some of the soldiers must have been picked out on account of their brutality, many being obvious sadists who could find outlet and indulge themselves here, while others were ordinary and, in any context, considerate men doing a job for work.
Two years later they tried to remove all traces; having demolished Teblinka’s every structure they built a farm on the site and instructed the Ukrainian family they installed in it to say they had lived there always. The same occurred in Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmno, all traces gone. All around, life went on as nothing had happened.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 6

“Human life as a cluster of mussels clinging to rocks in the sea, human beings as beetles and vermin, man as a shoal of writhing fish brought gasping to the surface in nets. If, however, we stand up close to each individual, so close as to hear each name as it is whispered, to look into each pair of eyes, where the soul of every human is revealed, unique and in alienable, and listen attentively to every story of a day in the life of each and every one of them, a day in the company of loved ones, family and friends, an ordinary day in an ordinary place, with all its joy and delicacy, envy and curiosity, routines and spontaneity, imagination and boredom, hate and love, then the opposite becomes apparent, the one, not as I, but as the I’s necessary. Which is you.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 6

“The reasoning here is typical of Kershaw’s work, which is marred by his describing everything, and I mean everything, about Hitler extremely negatively, even such aspects as relate to his childhood and youth, as if his whole life were tainted by what he would become and do some twenty years later, as if in some way he were evil incarnate, or as if evil were some core inside him, immutable and irremediable, and thereby an explanation of why things turned out the way they did.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“How I ever could have produced such a happy little boy was a mystery.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 6

“… some thoughts are nearby, either easy to grasp or hard to see because we are right up close, some thoughts we need to reach for, others are higher up and can only be made our own by the greatest, most alpine of efforts, while others are low and grubby, close to the ground and to the earthly.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 6

“A law without language was as inconceivable as a poem without language. Law and poetry were connected; they were two sides of the same coin.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“Conscience is morality as it appears in the individual.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“Odilon Redon,”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, The End

“Kubin”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, The End

“Now that Nazism has become 'they', it is easy to distance ourselves from it, but this was not the case when Nazism was 'we'. If we are to understand what happened and how it was possible, we must understand this first. And we must understand too that Nazism in its various elements was not monstrous in itself, by which I mean that it did not arise as something obviously monstrous and evil, separate from all else in the current society, but was on the contrary part of that current. The gas chambers were not a German invention, but were conceived by Americans who realised that people could be put to death by placing them in a chamber infused with posionous gas, a procedure they carried out for the first time in 1919. Paranoid anti-Semitism was not a German phenomenon either, the world's most celebrated and passionate anti-Semite in 1925 being not Adolf Hitler but Henry Ford. And racial biology was not an abject, shameful discipline pursued at the bottom of society or its shabby periphery, it was the scientific state of the art, much as genetics is today, haloed by the light of the future and all its hope. Decent humans distanced themselves from all this, but they were few, and this fact demands our consideration, for who are we going to be when our decency is put to the test? Will we have the courage to speak against what everyone else believes, our friends, neighbours and colleagues, to insist that we are decent and they are not? Great is the power of the we, almost inescapable its bonds, and the only thing we can really do is to hope our we is a good we. Because if evil comes it will not come as 'they', in the guise of the unfamiliar that we might turn away without effort, it will come as 'we'. It will come as what is right.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 6

“If we accord the highest value to the life of the individual, if we understand life to be a quantitative concept that must be maintained for as long as possible, then death is our foremost enemy and war becomes absolutely meaningless, absolutely undersirable. If we do not accord the highest value to the life of the individual, but to some element of that life, a property, or to something outside of it, an idea, then we consider life as something qualitative, something more than the sum of cells and living days, in other words we hold that there is something more hallowed than life, and then the equation is simple and one might choose to die for it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 6

“At the same time, something happened when I entered my thirties, in that some semblance of confidence came to me in the way I engaged with literature, though it was difficult to pin down, most of all a feeling of being able to see that little bit further, think that little bit further, and that what previously had been closed to me suddenly seemed possible to prize open.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“That’s what money bought, lots of space and distance from others. But not too much space and not too much distance. In the forests you could have as much space as you wanted and there could be miles to the nearest neighbor, but no one with money would ever dream of living there. Space and distance were valuable only if there were other people nearby who had a lot less space and lived a lot closer to each other.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6