Knausgaard Karl Quotes

#1. My memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#2. Concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#3. Obedience is the highest practical courage.

Charles Spurgeon

#4. I'm not interested in how people move, but what moves them.

Pina Bausch

#5. She told him.
And watched the man go from determined cop to utterly enraged lover.

Leslie Parrish

#6. I had never imagined that happiness could hurt so much.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove

#7. I have this habit to bow my head, as to look shorter, maybe as a result of an unconscious demand of not taking up so much space.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#8. I was the kind to endure. No one had said you couldn't become a better person through endurance.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove

#9. The eye of God ends up inside, so that, in the end, you take care of judgment and punishment yourself.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#10. When it comes to memories of that iconic type, memories that are burned into you, I have maybe ten or so from my childhood. I'm a bad rememberer of situations. I forget almost everything as soon as it happens.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#11. Form is, in a way, death. A novelist's obligation is to break free from the form, even though he knows that this will also be seen as artificial and distanced from life.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#12. I have quite a bit of sympathy for the idea that psychology and cognitive science have much to offer philosophy, and that the reverse is true as well.

L.A. Paul

#13. I have a longing for fiction, to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#14. I was the son of the man who had ruined everything.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove

#15. this was not the end of the world, actually it was the world.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove

#16. My answer would be definite yes! Destructive atheism, in my view and the view of the Church, is part of a much larger picture - cosmic warfare, that is, between God and Evil, between God and Satan.

Gerard Verschuuren

#17. It's one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It's another to have it captured in writing.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#18. I am happy because I am no longer an author.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#19. For life, it's very, very bad to be sensitive, but for a writer, it's very good.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#20. Women can say anything they want to men, or blacks to whites, with impunity. But strong words in the other direction can bring down on students the wrath of the campus thought police - as well as punishments that can extend to suspension or expulsion.

Thomas Sowell

#21. I'm giving away my family's story. Who owns the family's story? I don't. But you could turn it around and ask, 'Who is to deny me to write my family's story?' I have hurt people, but I don't think in a dangerous way. But you can't tell.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#22. I do feel guilty. I do. Especially about my family, my children. I write about them, and I know that this will haunt them as well through their lives. Why did I do that to them?

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#23. Who's that?" Yngve said, nodding discreetly in the direction of a woman. She wore a hat with a veil that concealed her face. "No idea," I said. "But all self-respecting funerals have a woman no one recognizes." We laughed. "Well, the danger's over now," Yngve said, and we both laughed again.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove

#24. When I look back at that freedom of childhood, which is in a way infinite, and at all the joy and the intense happiness, now lost, I sometimes think that childhood is where the real meaning of life is located, and that we, adults, are its servants - that that's our purpose.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#25. I guess I have a talent for humiliation, a place within me that experience can't reach, which is terrible in real life but something that comes in handy in writing. It seems as though humiliation has become a career for me.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#26. Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.

Samuel Johnson

#27. For it is not what happens to us that determines our character, our experience, our karma, and our destiny - but how we relate to what happens.

Lama Surya Das

#28. Is literature more important than hurting people? You can't argue that. You can't say it. It's impossible.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#29. My intention throughout has been to write, to create literature, and to be able to look people in the eye after I'd done it - the people I'd written about.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#30. As a person, I'm polite - I want to please.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#31. Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#32. The difficult thing for me is that I want basically to be a good man. That's what I want to be.

Karl Ove Knausgaard