Top 100 Knausgard Quotes
#1. I have never understood the point of holidays, have never felt the need for them and have always just wanted to do more work.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. They were going to work, I could see it in their eyes, they had that vacant wage-earner look. I
Karl Ove Knausgard
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. I stopped for a few seconds by the newspaper stand wondering whether to buy the two evening papers here, the two biggest publications. Reading them was like emptying a bag of trash over your head.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. There is only one thing children find harder to hold back than tears, and that is joy.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#21. 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
#22. For life, it's very, very bad to be sensitive, but for a writer, it's very good.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#23. Yngve came in and said that John Bonham, the drummer in Led Zeppelin, was on one of the songs.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#24. You're the only boy who talks about clothes," Solveig said. "I know," I said.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#25. I remember thinking all I wanted to do was to sit right there, in a newly built house, in a circle of light in the middle of the forest and be as stupid as I liked.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#26. 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
#27. 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 Knausgard
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#32. The general perception of writers' lives is that they are exciting and desirable. But you generally spend most of your time cooking and cleaning.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her 'b's.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. The problem is not so much that the world limits your imagination as your imagination limits the world.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#44. For me, personally, it is very important that the days are exactly the same, so I have routines. I do the same thing every day.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#45. That is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#46. 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
#47. The other guests clapped. I sat down again, full of disgust for myself, because even though losing control of my emotions made a good impression and gave extra emphasis to what I had said, I was ashamed that I had revealed such weakness.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#48. If you are disappearing from yourself, but you're still writing, then there is a kind of activity of thinking going on, which in my world is similar to what's going on in music.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Who cares about politics when there are flames licking at your insides?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#53. He was the kind to cut through to the essence, and thus someone who made a difference.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#54. He was a particularly detestable boy. He reminded me of myself when I was younger.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#55. 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 Knausgard
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Understanding must not be confused with knowledge for I knew next to nothing
Karl Ove Knausgard
#59. 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
#60. Saying what you believe others want to hear is, of course, a form of lying.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#61. Now it was ruined. That was what I wanted. And now it had happened.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#62. 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
#63. How desperate do you have to be to start doing push-ups to solve your problems?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#64. 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 Knausgard
#65. The needs of the moment always trumped promises of the future, however enticing the latter.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. If dogs can smell fear, girls can smell nervousness, that was my experience. From
Karl Ove Knausgard
#71. For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#72. I try to write about small insignificant things. I try to find out if it's possible to say anything about them. And I almost always do if I sit down and write about something. There is something in that thing that I can write about. It's very much like a rehearsal. An exercise, in a way.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#73. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature's other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these take control over form, the result is poor. That is why writers with a strong style often write poor books.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I sat down on the sofa, strangely restless, it was as though the tempo inside me was greater than that outside.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#77. 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
#79. 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
#80. the intensity was so great that sometimes life felt almost unlivable, and when nothing could give me any peace of mind except books, with their different places, different times, and different people, where I was no one and no one was me. That
Karl Ove Knausgard
#81. To have an outside where you've come from and an inside where you are going.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#82. When I look back at what I've written and try to explain it, it doesn't help, but it helps to be in a process of writing. It's the same thing with reading - you lose yourself when you read as well. When I was younger I used literature that way, it was just escapism, a tool to run away from things.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#83. The very thought of Dad, the fact that he existed, caused fear to pump through my body.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. I'd had the picture of John Lennon in my room all the time I was at gymnas and proceeded to hang it on the wall behind the typewriter.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Attributing to another author, Writing a novel is like setting a goal and walking there in your sleep.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#94. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about.
Karl Ove Knausgard
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