Top 100 Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes
#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 Knausgard
#2. She always brought something when she came on Fridays, and this time it had been a book. A Wizard of Earthsea, written by someone called Ursula K. Le Guin, and already after the first few pages I knew that this was an absolutely fantastic book.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#3. For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#4. Death makes life meaningless because verything we have ever striven for ceases when life does, and it makes life meaningful too, because its presence makes the little we have of it indispensable, every moment precious.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#5. This state lasted for six months, for six months I was truly happy, truly at home in this world and in myself before slowly it began to lose its luster, and once more the world moved out of my reach.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#6. I was drunk in that pure joyful way you can be from white wine, when your thoughts collide with one another like bubbles and what emerges when they burst is pleasure.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#7. This wasn't about knowledge but about the aura knowledge exuded, the places it came from, which were almost all outside the world we lived in now, yet were still within the ambivalent space where all historical objects and ideas reside.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#8. The needs of the moment always trumped promises of the future, however enticing the latter.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#9. I, for my part, never looked forward to anything except the moment the office door closed behind me and I was alone and able to write.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#10. How desperate do you have to be to start doing push-ups to solve your problems?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#11. There was something I couldn't do and something I didn't understand. There were secrets and there was darkness, there were shady dealings and there was laughter that jeered at everything. Oh, I sensed it, but I knew nothing about it. Nothing.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#12. Now it was ruined. That was what I wanted. And now it had happened.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#13. Saying what you believe others want to hear is, of course, a form of lying.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#14. But now he was married and had children, and even though he still had the boat the aura of island romanticism had gone. The long hair too.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#15. Understanding must not be confused with knowledge for I knew next to nothing
Karl Ove Knausgard
#16. Nevertheless I have more than enough information to know his mood. This is apparent not from his facial expressions but his physical posture, and you do not read it with your mind but with your intuition.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#17. Now they're twenty-four and their real lives lie before them. Jobs of their own, a house of their own, children of their own. There are the two of them, and the future they are moving into is theirs, too.
Or is it?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#18. Who cares about politics when there are flames licking at your insides?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#19. I would have loved to buy a hot dog from her, just to watch her squeezing the ketchup and mustard from the plastic bottles over the sausage,
Karl Ove Knausgard
#20. What we never really comprehend, or don't want to comprehend, is that this happens outside us, that we ourselves have no part in it, that we are only that which grows and dies, as blind as the waves in the sea are blind.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#21. I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#22. For a moment I was filled with the sensation of white snow against black water. The way the whiteness erases all the detail around a lake or a river in the forest so that the difference between land and water is absolute, and the water lies there as a deeply alien entity, a black hole in the world.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#24. When I came to a halt by my front door I looked at my watch.
It had taken me fifteen minutes to walk around the whole village.
So it was within these fifteen minutes I was to live my whole life this coming year.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#25. We live in the best of worlds. But still, it's like we've lost something on the way to here: a sense of life. I can't know for sure, I might be the only one who's lost it. Maybe everybody else is living the now, thinking they're having it well. Anyhow, that motivated me to write the books.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#26. National identity is a motion. It's something you're inside, you don't get what's happening, you can't see it from above. And that's where you have to write. You can't see what's happening now or what's going to happen, so you just dive into it and write.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#27. 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.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#28. You're the only person I know who can take communion despite not believing in God and not commit blasphemy. The only person I know.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#29. Everything has become intellect, even our bodies, they aren't bodies any more, but ideas of bodies, something that is situated in our own heaven of images and conceptions within us and above us, where an increasingly large part of our lives is lived.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#30. Why would someone with such red cheeks who liked to go on long walks in the forest have such a big cock? I wondered. What would he do with it?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#31. Children ate whole wheat pasta and whole wheat bread and all sorts of weird coarse-grained rice that their stomachs could not digest properly, but that didn't matter because it was "beneficial," it was "healthy," it was "wholesome.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#33. To have an outside where you've come from and an inside where you are going.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#34. 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 Knausgard
#36. I wandered beneath the sun-dappled shade from the trees, surrounded by the warm fragrances of the forest, thinking that I was in the middle of my life. Not life as an age, not halfway along life's path, but in the middle of my existence. My heart trembled.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#37. Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her 'b's.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#38. You're the only boy who talks about clothes," Solveig said. "I know," I said.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#39. Yngve came in and said that John Bonham, the drummer in Led Zeppelin, was on one of the songs.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#40. For life, it's very, very bad to be sensitive, but for a writer, it's very good.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#41. What was the point of all this? Flying all over Norway to read for ten minutes to four people? Talking smugly about literature to twelve people? Saying stupid things in the newspapers and burning with shame the day after
Karl Ove Knausgard
#42. There is only one thing children find harder to hold back than tears, and that is joy.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#43. I wanted dad's life to be seen in that perspective, not the closeup, not the man children feared and who later drank himself to death, but the broad view, a human who was born on earth, pure and innocent, as all are at birth, and who lived a life as all humans do and died his death.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#44. It was always women who took care of everything to do with children and school. They were the ones who went to parents' evenings, they were the ones who signed the slips children took home, they were the ones who did voluntary work and made sure school trips and so on were paid for.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#45. Not only did I change city and country, but also all the people. If this might seem strange, it is even stranger that I hardly ever reflect on it. How did I end up here? Why did things turn out like this?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#46. 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 Knausgard
#47. I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#48. But I could see that she was not having the same experience as me, she was lying as before, with eyes closed, mouth half-open, breathing heavily, engrossed in what I had been engrossed, but was not any longer.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#49. What was it that Rilke wrote? That music raised him out of himself, and never returned him to where it had found him, but to a deeper place, somewhere in the unfinished.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#50. In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#51. Indifference is one of the seven deadly sins, actually the greatest
of them all, because it is the only one that sins against life.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#52. They were going to work, I could see it in their eyes, they had that vacant wage-earner look. I
Karl Ove Knausgard
#53. One joy of life in the north comes after a winter storm, when the sky, freed of its burden, has paled, and the glow of the unseen sun is everywhere reflected by the snow, so that all things stand out sharp and clear.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#54. I feel almost physically ill in the presence of boring people who consider themselves especially interesting and who blow their own trumpets.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#55. One's self-image not only encompasses the person you are but also the person you wanted to be, could be or once had been.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#56. All I needed to know, all true knowledge, the only really essential knowledge, was to be found in the books I read and the music I listened to
Karl Ove Knausgard
#57. In our century even our dreams are alike, even dreams are things we sell. Undifferentiated, which is just another way of saying indifferent.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#58. Perhaps they were dead and imagined they were living? Perhaps everyone was dead? Perhaps he'd always been dead? That what he'd always assumed was life was actually death?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#59. Shameless actually good since it gives a kind of freedom. We consider the old, functionless shame destructive. Today, if you have a strong sense of shame you also have a strong desire to overcome it. And that's when you can write.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#60. Academic writing was actually about hiding what you didn't know. There was a language, a technique, and I had mastered it. In everything there were gaps which language could cover over as long as you had acquired the know-how.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#61. Stendhal wrote that music was the highest form of art and that all the other forms really wanted to be music. This was of course a Platonic idea, all the other art forms depict something else, music is the only one that is something in itself, it was absolutely incomparable.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#62. The life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it, and always had done. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#63. That is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#64. The problem is not so much that the world limits your imagination as your imagination limits the world.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#65. 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 Knausgard
#66. I'm not interested in the words or the meaning of the words. I'm interested in disappearing in it completely, to not be aware of yourself at all. That's the way music works for me. It's purely emotional. It goes straight to the heart. There are no explanations. That's just it.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#67. with a mouth of lush church grass I stand at the crossroads drinking the light of faith on the shores of eternity I lead my body, on like a dun horse in the dusk toward the forest somewhere
Karl Ove Knausgard
#68. I clambered onto the rear seat and leaned back. Taxis, I loved taxis. Not the ones I came home drunk in, but the ones I caught to airports or railway stations. Was there anything better than sitting in the rear seat of a taxi and being driven through towns and suburbs before a long journey?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#69. The next day we moved my things, that is to say all my books, which had now grown to number two and a half thousand titles, a fact which Anders and Geir, who were helping me with the move, cursed from the bottom of their hearts as we shifted the boxes from the lift into the flat.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#70. Physics too is an interpretation of the world and an arrangement of the world, and not an explanation of the world," and that "we have measured the value of the world with categories that refer to a purely fabricated world.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#71. what I had tried to do was take the little novel, about one person, where there is not much external action, it is all internal, and extend it into an epic format, do you understand what I mean? He
Karl Ove Knausgard
#72. What you lust for is innocence and this is an impossible equation. Lust and innocence can never be compatible. The ultimate is no longer the ultimate when you've stuck your dick in it.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#73. Taxis, I loved taxis. Not the ones I came home drunk in, but the ones I caught to airports or railway stations.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#74. Besides, tomorrow everything would look different. The day always came with more than mere light. However frayed your emotions, it was impossible to be wholly unaffected by the day's new beginnings.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#76. 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 Knausgard
#77. Continually, a storm blew through our world and it always had, and the only place I knew where this was formulated, the most extreme yet simplest things, was in these holy scriptures.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#78. 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 Knausgard
#79. If you really love me, you have to come to me without demands, I thought but didn't say, I wanted her to notice on her own.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#80. Off with my clothes, switch on the water, steaming hot, over my head, down my body.
Should i have a wank?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#81. ... to sit alone in a bar chatting with strangers would have been inconceivable for me, it was closer to my nature to make waffles alone in my bedsit...
Karl Ove Knausgard
#82. 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 Knausgard
#83. A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and parking lots, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#84. Before i going out i stood in such a way that i could see the face in the wooden flooring. and i was really Christ.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#85. All my adult life I have kept a distance from other people, it has been my way of coping, because I become so incredibly close to others in my thoughts and feelings of course, they only have to look away dismissively for a storm to break inside me.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#86. But what we were best at, what we were really the kings of, that was buses and sitting around in bedrooms. No one could beat us at that.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#87. It is not the case that we are born equal and that the conditions of life make our lives unequal, it is the opposite, we are born unequal, and the conditions of life make our lives more equal.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#88. Attending a poetry reading is like being in a hospital," he said as we left the next station. "Full of neuroses.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#89. And isn't it actually unbelievable that one simple name encompasses all of this? The fetus in the belly, the infant on the changing table, the forty-year-old in front of the computer, the old man in the chair, the corpse on the bench?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#90. You don't think when you play music, you just try to play and be in it. It is the same for me when the writing is going really well. It's the same kind of feeling. I'm just in it. It's not the words, it's not the sentences, I'm not aware of it. Then it's good.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#92. Shame tells you when you've gone too far. Then you try if it's okay to go too far. And it might be so that shame was right. You can never, never know that.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#93. I never read the translation before publication. The most important things for me is that the emotion is captured in such a way that the feelings that are in the original are there, much more than the details, if they are right or wrong.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#94. It is the era that we take photos of, not the people in it, they can't be captured.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#95. With his hair sticking out in all directions, his suit askew and his tie full of stains he sat there talking, his eyes aglow, they were really glowing, and I will always remember it, for it was pitch-dark outside, the rain was beating against the windows, it was Christmas Eve in Norway 1986,
Karl Ove Knausgard
#96. What the fuck had that got to do with me? I sent her a look of sympathy and concentrated on preventing my eyes from wandering, which can easily happen in such situations.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#97. Her boyfriend was a member of the same congregation, and if I did not threaten their relationship directly I was at least a contrast to her other life.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#98. 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. The
Karl Ove Knausgard
#99. All erect dicks are bent. Or, if not all, then at least enough of them to be eulogized in a poem.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#100. I had never been allowed to invite friends on my birthday, and nor was I on this one. I was sullen and surly, I ate the cake without a word ...
Karl Ove Knausgard
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