Top 100 Quotes About Ove
#1. Ove doubts whether someone who can't park a car properly should even be allowed to vote. When
Fredrik Backman
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#6. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#12. 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
#13. Is literature more important than hurting people? You can't argue that. You can't say it. It's impossible.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
#14. If dogs can smell fear, girls can smell nervousness, that was my experience. From
Karl Ove Knausgard
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. When you have something to do life will not allow you to ove foward until you do it.
Iyanla Vanzant
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The needs of the moment always trumped promises of the future, however enticing the latter.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. How desperate do you have to be to start doing push-ups to solve your problems?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Now it was ruined. That was what I wanted. And now it had happened.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#28. Saying what you believe others want to hear is, of course, a form of lying.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Understanding must not be confused with knowledge for I knew next to nothing
Karl Ove Knausgard
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. He was a particularly detestable boy. He reminded me of myself when I was younger.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#40. 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
#41. He was the kind to cut through to the essence, and thus someone who made a difference.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#42. 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
#43. Ove is the sort of man who checks the status of all things by giving them a good kick. He
Fredrik Backman
#44. Who cares about politics when there are flames licking at your insides?
Karl Ove Knausgard
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Men like Ove and Rune were from a generation in which one was what one did, not what one talked about.
Fredrik Backman
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Ove cushions all your irritations, unnatural instincts, hatreds and immaturities.
Ray Bradbury
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. I feel so much loss, Ove. Loss, as if my heart was beating outside my body.
Fredrik Backman
#58. I just wanted to know what it felt like to be someone you look at.
Fredrik Backman
#59. 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
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Attributing to another author, Writing a novel is like setting a goal and walking there in your sleep.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. I sat down on the sofa, strangely restless, it was as though the tempo inside me was greater than that outside.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#70. 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
#71. It wasn't as if Ove also died when Sonja left him. He just stopped living. Grief is a strange thing.
Fredrik Backman
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#76. Ove has a heart problem ... he begins in an anodyne voice, following this up with a series of terms that no human being with less than ten years of medical training or an entirely unhealthy addiction to certain television series could ever be expected to understand.
Fredrik Backman
#77. The very thought of Dad, the fact that he existed, caused fear to pump through my body.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#78. All you have control ove is this moment. Chase it.
Anna Kay Akana
#79. 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
#80. To have an outside where you've come from and an inside where you are going.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#81. 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
#82. The London 'Academy' has seen fit recently to scoff at the critics who have been exercising themselves ove rthe so-called art of the Short Story ... But the new Short Story has gained more individuality. It supports the magazines and has invaded the newspapers
Henry Seidel Canby
#83. She just smiled, said that she loved books more than anything, and started telling him excitedly what each of the ones in her lap was about. And Ove realised that he wanted to hear her talking about the things she loved for the rest of his life.
Fredrik Backman
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. The three-year-old looked as if she was ready to try to hug the cat. The cat looked as if it was ready to pick out the three-year-old from a lineup at a police station. Ove
Fredrik Backman
#88. Ove stomped forward. The cat stood up. Ove stopped. They stood there measuring up to each other for a few moments, like two potential troublemakers in a small-town bar. Ove considered throwing one of his clogs at it. The cat looked as if it regretted not bringing its own clogs to lob back.
Fredrik Backman
#89. Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her 'b's.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#90. 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
#91. You're the only boy who talks about clothes," Solveig said. "I know," I said.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#92. Yngve came in and said that John Bonham, the drummer in Led Zeppelin, was on one of the songs.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#93. For life, it's very, very bad to be sensitive, but for a writer, it's very good.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#94. When engineers and quantity surveyors discuss aesthetics and architects study what cranes do we are on the right road.
Ove Arup
#95. All I can really tell you, laddie, is to live for today. For the moment. Wasting time is the biggest mistake we can make in lo-ove.
Elizabeth Morgan
#96. ...he had begun more and more to differentiate between people who did what they should, and hide who didn't. People who did and people who just talked.
Fredrik Backman
#97. 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
#98. There is only one thing children find harder to hold back than tears, and that is joy.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#99. 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
#100. 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
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