Summer Quotes

“few things are a more satisfying substitute for the presence of other people than writing, which at the same time provides an excuse for one's antisocial behaviour, for everyone knows that someone who writes has a great need for solitude.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Summer

“reading a good novel is like seeing a landscape emerge when water subsides”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Summer

“A person who is everyone is no one, empty. A person who is someone can always become someone else.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Summer

“Only by forgetting that one is writing can one write and give an external expression to the internal thought without it being marked or prevented by shame, as all other external expressions are.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Summer

“A name is like a bag with one's entire identity inside, or like a carrying case. When we die, only the case is left, gathering together all the feelings and thoughts associated with our person.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Summer

“I asked whether beauty was important to her. She said she had been trained to be suspicious of beauty, to be on guard against it. So am I, it is a tenet of our culture that beauty, at least the obviously beautiful, the eye-catchingly beautiful, the pastoral and the idyllic, but also the dramatically beautiful, represents poor taste in art, that it is inferior and banal. But why be mistrustful of beauty, isn't beauty good? I think that what is meant by beauty is the simple, the unresisting, the superficial, in other words the reproduced, what we recognise without really seeing it, because the gaze upon beauty was there before us. And the task of art is to see something as it really is, as if for the first time. And if we are serious about seeing, then the person who sees is also a part of it, for there is no such thing as a neutral gaze, a neutral landscape, it is always charged with an underlying meaning.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Om sommeren

“Het wilgenroosje straalt iets primitiefs uit, iets grofs en oerplantachtigs, het is niet verfijnd, hoewel het mooie, kleurrijke tapijten vormt, en op een merkwaardige manier was het ook betekenisvol dat het juist zo goed gedijde in de grote nieuwbouwwijken, die, hoewel ze toen modern waren en de nieuwe tijd vertegenwoordigden, ook iets eenvoudigs en bruuts hadden - heuvels werden opgeblazen, bossen werden gekapt, de machines denderden en schudden - en tegelijk daarmee, met de hopen blauwe granietsteen, het pas gelegde zwarte asfalt, de grindbergen en gele kiepwagens en bulldozers, schoten de eenvoudige, snelgroeiende en robuuste planten uit de grond, met als enige geheim het meest voor de hand liggende, dat alle fossiele en primitieve schepsels deelden, namelijk dat de wereld altijd nieuw is.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Om sommeren