Knut Hamsun Quotes

#1. Some writers refuse to lay their heads peaceably on the pillow of literary history in order to give posterity good dreams.
review in London Review of Books, of the works of Knut Hamsun (26 nov 1998)

James Wood

#2. Please God, please Knut Hamsun, don't desert me now. I started to write and I wrote:
The time has come, the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing-wax
Of cabbages - and kings -

John Fante

#3. But now it was spring again, and spring was almost unbearable for sensitive hearts. It drove creation to its utmost limits, it wafted its spice-laden breath even into the nostrils of the innocent.

Knut Hamsun

#4. Do not forget, some give little, and it is much for them, others give all, and it costs them no effort; who then has given most?

Knut Hamsun

#5. The whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow.

Knut Hamsun

#6. Today riches and honours have been lavished on me, but one gift has been lacking, the most important one of all, the only one that matters, the gift of youth.

Knut Hamsun

#7. You are right; I am not good at moving in society. Be merciful. You do not understand me; I live in the woods by choice
that is my happiness. Here, where I am all alone, it can hurt no one that I am as I am; but when I go among others, I have to use all my will power to be as I should.

Knut Hamsun

#8. A shaft of sweetness shoots through me from top to toe when the sun rises; I shoulder my gun in silent exaltation.

Knut Hamsun

#9. At that moment not a single sad thought entered my mind; I forgot my privation and felt soothed by the sight of the harbour, which lay there lovely and peaceful in the semi-darkness.

Knut Hamsun

#10. Summer is the time for dreaming, and then you have to stop. But some people go on dreaming all their lives, and cannot change.

Knut Hamsun

#11. I will exile my thoughts if they think of you again, and I will rip my lips out if they say your name once more. Now if you do exist, I will tell you my final word in life or in death, I tell you goodbye.

Knut Hamsun

#12. I have gone to the forest

Knut Hamsun

#13. I see stars before my eyes, and my thoughts are swept up into a hurricane of light.

Knut Hamsun

#14. There wasn't a cloud in my mind, nor did I feel any discomfort, and I hadn't a single unfulfilled desire or craving as far as my thoughts could reach.

Knut Hamsun

#15. What have you done to your eyes? They're all red. Have you been crying?' 'No,' he answers, laughing, 'but I've been staring into my fairy tales, where the sun is very strong.

Knut Hamsun

#16. When I got outside, I came to a standstill and said loudly in the open street, as I clenched my hands: "I will tell you one thing, my good Lord God, you are a bungler!" and I nod furiously, with set teeth, up to the clouds; "I will be hanged if you are not a bungler.

Knut Hamsun

#17. Young hearts have their unfathomable depths.

Knut Hamsun

#18. Heaven knows that there are plenty of opportunities in later life, too, for being carried away. What of it? We remain what we are and, no doubt, it is all very good for us!

Knut Hamsun

#19. I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.

Knut Hamsun

#20. I would be beholden to no man, not even for a blanket.

Knut Hamsun

#21. Truth is neither ojectivity nor the balanced view; truth is a selfless subjectivity.

Knut Hamsun

#22. There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.

Knut Hamsun

#23. And love became the world's beginning and the world's ruler; but all its ways are full of flowers and blood, flowers and blood.

Knut Hamsun

#24. A few days back someone sent me two feathers. Two bird's feathers in a sheet of note-paper with a coronet, and fastened with a seal. Sent from a place a long way off; from one who need not have sent them back at all. That amused me too, those devilish green feathers.

Knut Hamsun

#25. But it doesn't matter. Nothing matters now. And the sound of her voice in the forest was just like a little tremulous song. And the leaves turn even more yellow, fall is approaching; more stars have appeared in the sky, and from now on the moon looks like a shadow of silver dipped in gold.

Knut Hamsun

#26. I can't even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace.

Knut Hamsun

#27. Light dresses, blue eyes, the tinkling of glasses, the sea, the white sails. We sang snatches of song. And our cheeks became rosy.

Knut Hamsun

#28. However, I must not indulge in homespun wisdom here before so distinguished an assembly, especially as I am to be followed by a representative of science.

Knut Hamsun

#29. Keep it, keep it!" I answered. "You are very welcome to it! It is only a couple of small things, doesn't amount to anything - about everything I own in the world.

Knut Hamsun

#30. No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.

Knut Hamsun

#31. One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word.

Knut Hamsun

#32. Growth of the soil was something different, a thing to be procured at any cost; the only source, the origin of all. A dull and desolate existence? Nay, least of all. A man had everything; his powers above, his dreams, his loves, his wealth of superstition.

Knut Hamsun

#33. A word can be transformed into a coulour, light, a smell; it is the writer's task to use it in such a way that it serves, never fails, can never be ignored.

Knut Hamsun

#34. The writer must be able to revel and roll in the abundance of words; he must know not only the direct but also the secret power of a word. There are overtones and undertones to a word, and lateral echoes, too.

Knut Hamsun

#35. You are welcome to your intellectual pastimes and books and art and newspapers; welcome, too, to your bars and your whisky that only makes me ill. Here am I in the forest, quite content.

Knut Hamsun

#36. I was conscious all the time that I was following mad whims without being able to do anything about it ... . Despite my alienation from myself at that moment, and even though I was nothing but a battleground for invisible forces, I was aware of every detail of what was going on around me.

Knut Hamsun

#37. Never stand around saying 'Poor thing' and being pitiful
when things are being killed. It makes them tough and harder to kill.
Remember that!

Knut Hamsun

#38. Well, bless my soul, what stupid creatures one has to mix with in this world!

Knut Hamsun

#39. And love was creation's source,creation's ruler;
but all love's ways are strewn with blossoms and blood, blossoms and blood.

Knut Hamsun

#40. No matter how much I kept telling myself that I was behaving like an idiot, it was no use.

Knut Hamsun

#41. No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.

Knut Hamsun

#42. The heavy red roses smoldering in the foggy morning, blood-colored and uninhibited, made me greedy, and tempted me powerfully to steal one
I asked the prices merely so I could come as near them as possible.

Knut Hamsun

#43. I was on the verge of crying with grief at still being alive.

Knut Hamsun

#44. Small jerks began to appear in my legs, my walk became unsteady precisely because I wanted it to be smooth.

Knut Hamsun

#45. Rather than admire the mediocre great men over whom passersby nudge each other in awe, I venerate the young, unknown geniuses who die in their teens, their souls shattered - delicate, phosphorescent glowworms that one must see to know they really did exist.

Knut Hamsun

#46. Were I more conversant with literature and its great names, I could go on quoting them ad infinitum and acknowledge my debt for the merit you have been generous enough to find in my work.

Knut Hamsun

#47. There was a rock in front of my hut, a tall, gray rock. By its looks it seemed to be well-disposed toward me ...

Knut Hamsun

#48. No, I don't admire the genius. But I admire and love the result of the genius's activity in the world, of which the great man is only the poor necessary tool, only, so to speak, the paltry awl to bore with.

Knut Hamsun

#49. The thought of God began to occupy me. It seemed to me in the highest degree indefensible of Him to interfere every time I sought for a place, and to upset the whole thing, while all the time I was but imploring enough for a daily meal.

Knut Hamsun

#50. My head was emptying and emptying, and in the end it sat light and void on my shoulders. I percieved this gaping emptiness in my head with my whole body, I felt hollowed out from top to toe.

Knut Hamsun

#51. Earth and sea merged, the sea tossed itself in the air in a fantastic dance, into the shapes of men and horses and tattered banners. I stood in the lee of an overhanging rock and thought of many things.

Knut Hamsun

#52. But what really matters is not what you believe but the faith and conviction with which you believe ...

Knut Hamsun

#53. A country preacher could not have looked more full of milk and honey than this formidable writer, whose words had always left long bloody marks wherever they fell.

Knut Hamsun

#54. Language must resound with all the harmonies of music. The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing and is able to draw a sob from my soul by its very rightness.

Knut Hamsun

#55. Fall has arrived and has already begun to put everything into a deep sleep; flies and other insects have suffered their first setback, and up in the trees and down on the ground you can hear the sounds of struggling life, puttering , ceaselessly rustling, laboring not to perish.

Knut Hamsun

#56. In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.

Knut Hamsun

#57. Love is every bit as violent and dangerous as murder.

Knut Hamsun

#58. It was weather for dreams; for little fluttering quests of the heart.

Knut Hamsun

#59. fraudulent blue ozone

Knut Hamsun

#60. It is as well perhaps that this is not the first time I have been swept off my feet. In the days of my blessed youth there were such occasions; in what young person's life do they not occur?

Knut Hamsun

#61. What would it profit us, after all, even from a purely practical viewpoint, if we stripped life of all poetry, all dreams, all beautiful mysteries, all lies? What is truth, can you tell me that? You see, we only advanced by way of symbols, and we change the symbols as we progress.

Knut Hamsun

#62. For I mean to roam and think and make great irons red-hot.

Knut Hamsun

#63. The dark monsters out there would suck me up when night came on, and they would carry me far across the sea and through strange lands where no humans lived.

Knut Hamsun

#64. Oh, a woman can't tell one man from another; not always - not often.

Knut Hamsun

#65. My heart understands all, and it no longer beats, it peals.

Knut Hamsun

#66. A swarm of tiny noxious animals had bored a way into my inner man and hollowed me out.

Knut Hamsun

#67. What power that girl wielded, though there was nothing striking or unusual about her - unless one considered her long braid and her common sense!

Knut Hamsun

#68. Alas, love turns the human heart into a mildewed garden, a lush and shameless garden in which grow mysterious, obscene toadstools.

Knut Hamsun

#69. It was not my intention to collapse; no, I would die standing.

Knut Hamsun

#70. The ships whose masts I saw outlined against the sky looked, with their black hulls, like silent monsters that were raising their hackles and lying in wait for me.

Knut Hamsun

#71. I love three things," I then say. "I love a dream of love I once had, I love you, and I love this patch of earth."
"And which do you love best?"
"The dream.

Knut Hamsun

#72. I felt pleasantly empty, untouched by everything around me and happy to be unseen by all.

Knut Hamsun

#73. But things worked out. Everything works out. Though sometimes they work out sideways.

Knut Hamsun

#74. When good befalls a man he calls it Providence, when evil fate.

Knut Hamsun

#75. In my solitude, many miles from men and houses, I am in a childishly happy and carefree state of mind, which you are incapable of understanding unless someone explains it to you.

Knut Hamsun

#76. The long, long road over the moors and up into the forest - who trod it into being first of all? Man, a human being, the first that came here. There was no path before he came.

Knut Hamsun

#77. - Is that for me? said he.

- Yes, it's for you.

He took it carefully in his hands, and stroked it.

- Do you think it's nice?

- Nice - why I could go round the world in such.

Knut Hamsun

#78. And the great spirit of darkness spread a shroud over me ... everything was silent-everything. But upon the heights soughed the everlasting song, the voice of the air, the distant, toneless humming which is never silent.

Knut Hamsun