Winter Quotes

“I don’t know what is more frightening: a creature on a small planet worshipping itself and its world as if infinity did not exist, or a creature who burns its fellow beings because the infinite does exist.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Om vinteren

“The world had opened up, suddenly it contained new opportunities of a fantastic sort, for humans were not meant to fly through the air out in the forest. That only children sought out the fantastic”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Winter

“But if one gets to the point where the narrative of the one true love merges with the narrative of hedonistic, boundless sex, gradually other obstacles arise, for that kind of sex is contingent on distance, and if one is in a relationship, if one lives together every day, it is in the nature of the relationship that the distance gets smaller and smaller, one grows closer and closer together, that is what we call love, and the greater the love, the more difficult it becomes to reconcile it with sex, unless one is able to turn it into a game, and pretend that the person one is sleeping with doesn’t matter. Perhaps that is the supreme act of love, it strikes me now.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Winter

“Every single moment of life stands open in several directions, it is as if it had three or seven doors, as in a fairy tail, into rooms that all contain different futures. These hypothetical offshoots of time cease to exist whenever we make a choice, and have never existed in themselves, a little like the unknown faces we see in dreams. While the past is lost forever, everything that didn't happen in it is doubly lost. This creates a particular kind of feeling of loss, the melancholy of an unrealised past. The feeling sounds overwrought and unnecessary, something to fill our idle and sheltered souls, but it is founded on a fundamentally human insight and longing: everything could have been different.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Om vinteren

“when I myself am an adult and openness towards the new, the leap and its promise of freedom are unwanted.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Winter

“And if I equate the child I was then with the man I am now and say that the child’s happiness is worth every bit as much as the man’s, then those weeks were probably the happiest of my life: it is the only time I have achieved everything I dreamed of.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Winter

“They themselves think that Christmas presents are only about this, but I know that the gifts have a longer journey to travel: like hope, they come sailing from the islands of the imaginary future and onto reality’s shores, where they gain weight and presence, but not for long, for they are travelling on, out on the other side, into the lost past, where their lives will continue as incorporeal memories, which is perhaps the most important part of their existence, preserving the memory of the Christmases of childhood.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Winter

“They themselves think that Christmas presents are only about this, but I know that the gifts have a longer journey to travel: like hope, they come sailing from the islands of the imaginary future and onto reality’s shores, where they gain weight and presence, but not for long, for they are travelling on, out on the other side, into the lost past, where their lives will”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Winter

“Peace of mind comes when there is a balance between the inner and the outer, when the inner flows freely and unhindered into the outer, and vice versa.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Winter

“as if her soul were forced to fill a form which isn’t quite its own, not unlike a state that can be seen in certain horses, where the contrast between the powerful, magnificent body, capable of practically any feat of speed and wildness and daring, and the shy, extremely sensitive and tightly strung spirit, is so great that it seems unreasonable, and one longs on behalf of the animal for it to be spared all these saddles, halters, boxes and stables, all these elaborate exercises and performances, and just be allowed to gallop on a plain, free from everything, including itself.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Winter

“And it strikes me for the first time that maybe one’s lifespan is adapted to one’s days, that we die roughly when all the possibilities of variation contained within a given day have been exhausted.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Winter

“I think all cultural epochs are characterised by these two modes, the existence of a future and the absence of a future, and the strange thing is that culture seems to strive towards the absence of future, as if that were the highest form, when all longings have been fulfilled, but it isn't, because then longing turns towards the past, or towards something else that has been lost or was never accomplished.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Om vinteren

“When the snow-covered forest lies motionless beneath the faintly darkening sky, it is completely still. If it then begins to snow and the air fills with snowflakes, it is still completely silent, bu the silence is different, it seems to grow denser, more concentrated, and that sound, which is no sound, only a nuance of silence, a kind of intensifying or deepening of it, is the sonic expression of winter’s essence.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Winter

“...for what is the pipe that leads to the water tap other than an extension of the gullet, the pipe that leads out from the toilet bowl an extension of the colon and the urethra, the cable that transports images to the TV an extension of the brain? We live within this web of pipes and cables, and whether we are free depends on whether in this web we are like the spider or rather like the spider's prey.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Winter

“O outono é uma passagem, um tempo de esvaziamento: da luz no céu, do calor no ar, das folhas nas árvores e plantas. O inverno que se segue é um estado, nele é a imobilidade que impera. A terra endurece, a água gela, a neve cobre o chão. Que este estado por vezes se represente como um rei, deve-se talvez à sensação de que a imobilidade é algo imposto, algo que vem de fora e que é imposto pela força à paisagem.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Om vinteren

“The same year that the third great Viking ship found in Norway was excavated, at Oseberg, the town of Ålesund burned. At that time the Viking ships were displayed in makeshift exhibition halls, and the great Ålesund fire hastened the process of building a separate museum for them. The architect Fritz Holland proposed building an enormous crypt for them beneath the royal palace in Oslo. It was to be 63 metres long and 15 metres wide, with a niche for each ship. The walls were to be covered with reliefs of Viking motifs. Drawings exist of this underground hall. It is full of arches and vaults, and everything is made of stone. The ships stand in a kind of depression in the floor. More than anything it resembles a burial chamber, and that is fitting, one might think, both because the three ships were originally graves and because placed in a subterranean crypt beneath the palace gardens they would appear as what they represented: an embodiment of a national myth, in reality relics of a bygone era, alive only in the symbolic realm. The crypt was never built, and the power of history over the construction of national identity has since faded away almost entirely. There is another unrealised drawing of Oslo, from the 1920s, with tall brick buildings like skyscrapers along the main thoroughfare, Karl Johans Gate, and Zeppelins sailing above the city. When I look at these drawings, of a reality that was never realised, and feel the enormous pull they exert, which I am unable to explain, I know that the people living in Kristiania in 1904, as Oslo was called then, would have stared open-mouthed at nearly everything that surrounds us today and which we hardly notice, unable to believe their eyes. What is a stone crypt compared to a telephone that shows living pictures? What is the writing down of Draumkvedet (The Dream Poem), a late-medieval Norwegian visionary ballad, compared to a robot lawnmower that cuts the grass automatically?”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Winter