Min kamp 1 Quotes

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know that is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty... Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning. My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees me.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her 'b's.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing. Where this ideal has come from I have no idea, and as I now see it before me, in black and white, it almost seems perverse.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“When I look at a beautiful painting I have tears in my eyes, but not when I look at my children. That does not mean I do not love them, because I do, with all my heart, it simply means that the meaning they produce is not sufficient to fulfill a whole life. Not mine, at any rate.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty ”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“The thought of this could sometimes weigh me down because I wanted so much to be someone. I wanted so much to be special.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“I sipped the coffee and lit a cigarette. I can't say that I enjoyed the taste of coffee or the feeling of smoke descending into my lungs, I could barely distinguish the two, the point was to do it, it was a routine, and as with all routines, protocol was everything.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called “writing.” Writing is more about destroying than creating.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“And art has come to be a spectator of itself, the way it reacts, what newspapers write about it; the artist is a performer. That is how it is. Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religion does not know a beyond, not anymore. Our world is enclosed around itself, enclosed around us, and there is no way out of it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“that is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“This is not a loss, at any rate not for me, I don't get anything out of socializing anyway. I never say what I really think, what I really mean, but always more or less agree with whomever I am talking to at the time, pretend that what they say is of interest to me, except when I am drinking, in which case more often than not I go too far the other way, and wake up to the fear of having overstepped the mark. This has become more pronounced over the years and can last now for weeks. When I drink I also have blackouts and completely lose control of my actions, which are generally desperate and stupid, but also on occasion desperate and dangerous. That is why I no longer drink. I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees me. This is what must have engraved itself in my face, this is what must have made it so stiff and masklike and almost impossible to associate with myself whenever I happen to catch a glimpse of it in a shop window.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“Modernist literature with all its vast apparatus was an instrument, a form of perception, and once absorbed, the insights it brought could be rejected without its essence being lost, even the form endured, and it could be applied to your own life, your own fascinations, which could then suddenly appear in a new and significant light. Espen took that path, and I followed him like a brainless puppy, it was true, but I did follow him. I leafed through Adorno, read some passages of Benjamin, sat bowed over Blanchot for a few days, had a look at Derrida and Foucault, had a go at Kristeva, Lacan, Deleuze, while poems by Ekelöf, Björling, Pound, Mallarmé, Rilke, Trakl, Ashbery, Mandelstam, Lunden, Thomsen, and Hauge floated around, on which I spent more than a few minutes, I read them as prose, like a book by MacLean or Bagley, and learned nothing, understood nothing, but just having contact with them, having their books in the bookcase, led to a shifting of consciousness, just knowing they existed was an enrichment, and if they didn't furnish me with insights I became all the richer for intuitions and feelings.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if not young, then somehow transcend the time that otherwise marks the face. It is as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“A lot happens in our everyday life, but it always happens within the same routine, and more than anything else it has changed my perspective of time. For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“Taxis, I loved taxis. Not the ones I came home drunk in, but the ones I caught to airports or railway stations.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“It was a very special feeling to wake up in the morning, all alone in a flat, it was as though emptiness were not only around me but also inside me. Until I started at the gymnas I had always woken to a house where Mom and Dad were already up and on their way to work with all that entailed, cigarette smoke, coffee drinking, listening to the radio, eating breakfast, and car engines warming up outside in the dark. This was something else, and I loved it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Death in the Family

“It was a fantastic feeling, but it left me restless because the most important thing in it was the longing, for what was going to be, not for what I did or had done.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“When the wave, equally suddenly, retreated, it left a void which resembled that of the morning, yet had a character of its own, because though the pattern was repeated it was in reverse order: the scattered schoolchildren who passed my window now were on their way home and there was something unrestrained and boisterous about them, whereas when they had walked past on their way to school in the morning they still bore the silent imprint of sleep and the innate wariness we feel toward things that have not yet begun.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“the past is now barely present in my thoughts. I believe the main reason for that is our children, since life with them in the here and now occupies all the space. They even squeeze out the most recent past: Ask me what I did three days ago and I can’t remember. Ask me what Vanja was like two years ago, Heidi two months ago, John two weeks ago, and I can’t remember. A lot happens in our little everyday life, but it always happens within the same routine, and more than anything else it has changed my perspective of time. For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“Was it Jesus you saw a picture of?” he says and looks up at me. If it had not been for the friendly voice and the long pause before the question, I would have thought he was making fun of me. He finds it a little embarrassing that I am a Christian; all he wants is for me not to be different from the other kids, and of all the kids in the neighbourhood, his youngest son is the only one to call himself a Christian.
But he is really wondering about this.
I feel a flutter of joy because he actually cares, and at the same time I become a bit offended that he underestimates me like that.
I shake my head.
“It wasn’t Jesus,” I say.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1