Top 100 Ove's Quotes
#1. They sat at the back, each of them staring at a patch on the floor until it was over. and in all honesty, they spent more time missing Ove's mum than thinking about God.
Fredrik Backman
#2. Ove's wife sometimes jokes that the three worst words Ove knows in this life are "Batteries not included." People usually laugh when she says that. But Ove does not usually laugh.
Fredrik Backman
#3. The assistant, a young man with a single-digit body mass index, looks ill at ease. He visibly struggles to control his urge to snatch the box out of Ove's hands.
Fredrik Backman
#4. Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her 'b's.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#5. You have to love me twice as much now," she said.
And then Ove lied to her for the second - and last - time: he said that he would. Even though he knew it wasn't possible for him to love her anymore than he already did.
Fredrik Backman
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. It wasn't as if Ove also died when Sonja left him. He just stopped living. Grief is a strange thing.
Fredrik Backman
#9. 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
#10. I sat down on the sofa, strangely restless, it was as though the tempo inside me was greater than that outside.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Ove couldn't give a damn about people jogging. What he can't understand is why they have to make such a big thing of it. With those smug smiles on their faces, as if they were out there curing pulmonary emphysema.
Fredrik Backman
#15. Attributing to another author, Writing a novel is like setting a goal and walking there in your sleep.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#16. 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
#18. Ove was destined and would strike as true as unexpected lightning on a clear day or never come at all. -Jacinta, with love
Dean Francis Alfar
#19. 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
#20. I just wanted to know what it felt like to be someone you look at.
Fredrik Backman
#21. I feel so much loss, Ove. Loss, as if my heart was beating outside my body.
Fredrik Backman
#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
#23. In the beginning, though, they had been friends. Or, at least, friends to the extent that men like Ove and Rune were capable of being friends."
p. 81
Fredrik Backman
#24. Ove points at him with exasperation. You! You want to buy a French car. Don't worry so much about others, you have enough problems of your own.
Fredrik Backman
#25. When Sweden's Jan-Ove Waldner travels to China to play table tennis, he is mobbed when he leaves his hotel as if he were a rock star walking around Manhattan or a soccer star walking around Europe.
George Vecsey
#26. Ove cushions all your irritations, unnatural instincts, hatreds and immaturities.
Ray Bradbury
#27. One finds a way of living for the sake of someone else's future. And it wasn't as if Ove also died when Sonja left him. He just stopped living.
Fredrik Backman
#28. 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
#29. I walked around Stockholm's streets, modern and feminized, with a furious nineteenth-century man inside me.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Ove looks at the group assembled around him, as if he's been kidnapped and taken to a parallel universe. For a moment he thinks about swerving off the road, until he realises that the worst case scenario would be that they all accompanied him into the afterlife.
Fredrik Backman
#33. The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#34. Meghan's in lo-ove," sang the phouka, making my heart stop. "Meghan's in lo-ove. Meghan and Ash, sitting in a tre
"
-Tiaothin
Julie Kagawa
#35. Ove is fifty-nine. He drives a Saab. He's the kind of man who points at people he doesn't like the look of, as if they were burglars and his forefinger a policeman's flashlight.
Fredrik Backman
#36. Nine lives won't last you very long, will they?' says Ove. The cat licks its paw and looks as if it's not the sort of cat that likes to keep count.
Fredrik Backman
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. For life, it's very, very bad to be sensitive, but for a writer, it's very good.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#41. The two men looked at each other for a moment. Then Sonja's father nodded. And Ove nodded curtly back. And then they rose to their feet, objective and determined, in the way two men might behave if they had just agreed to go and kill a third man.
Henning Koch
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. We can busy ourselves with living or with dying, Ove. We have to move on. And that's how it was.
Fredrik Backman
#45. 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
#46. It's been six months since she died. But Ove still inspects the whole house twice a day to feel the radiators and check that she hasn't sneakily turned up the heating.
Fredrik Backman
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Ove gives the box a skeptical glance, as if it's a highly dubious sort of box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit pants and just called Ove "my friend" before offering to sell him a watch.
Fredrik Backman
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. How desperate do you have to be to start doing push-ups to solve your problems?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#54. Further to this, Ove has the cat's resentful stares to contend with. Something in its eyes reminds him of the way Sonja used to look at him.
Fredrik Backman
#55. 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
#56. The needs of the moment always trumped promises of the future, however enticing the latter.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#57. Engineering problems are under-defined, there are many solutions, good, bad and indifferent. The art is to arrive at a good solution. This is a creative activity, involving imagination, intuition and deliberate choice.
Ove Arup
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. When you have something to do life will not allow you to ove foward until you do it.
Iyanla Vanzant
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. If dogs can smell fear, girls can smell nervousness, that was my experience. From
Karl Ove Knausgard
#64. Is literature more important than hurting people? You can't argue that. You can't say it. It's impossible.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
#65. 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
#66. For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#71. 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
#72. Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Ove doubts whether someone who can't park a car properly should even be allowed to vote. When
Fredrik Backman
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Men like Ove and Rune were from a generation in which one was what one did, not what one talked about.
Fredrik Backman
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Who cares about politics when there are flames licking at your insides?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#84. Ove is the sort of man who checks the status of all things by giving them a good kick. He
Fredrik Backman
#85. 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
#86. He was the kind to cut through to the essence, and thus someone who made a difference.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#87. 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
#88. He was a particularly detestable boy. He reminded me of myself when I was younger.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Understanding must not be confused with knowledge for I knew next to nothing
Karl Ove Knausgard
#94. 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
#95. It's a sort of computer. There are special drawing programs for it. For children,' she whispers a little louder.
And something is shining in her eyes.
Something that Ove recognizes.
Fredrik Backman
#96. Because a time comes in every man's life when he decides what sort of man he's going to be: the kind who lets other people walk all over him, or not. Ove
Fredrik Backman
#97. 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
#98. Saying what you believe others want to hear is, of course, a form of lying.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#99. Now it was ruined. That was what I wanted. And now it had happened.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#100. He'd never understood the need to go around stewing on why things turned out the way they did. You are what you are and you do what you do, and that was good enough for Ove.
Fredrik Backman
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