Quotes from Min kamp 2

“All my adult life I have kept a distance from other people, it has been my way of coping, because I become so incredibly close to others in my thoughts and feelings of course, they only have to look away dismissively for a storm to break inside me.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“I feel almost physically ill in the presence of boring people who consider themselves especially interesting and who blow their own trumpets.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“I have no problem with uninteresting or unoriginal people – they may have other, more important attributes, such as warmth, consideration, friendliness, a sense of humor or talents such as being able to make a conversation flow to generate an atmosphere of ease around them, or the ability to make a family function – but I feel almost physically ill in the presence of boring people who consider themselves especially interesting and who blow their own trumpets.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“How desperate do you have to be to start doing push-ups to solve your problems?”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“Then I met Linda and the sun rose.
I can't find a better way to express it. The sun rose in my life. At first, as dawn breaking on the horizon, almost as if to say, this is where you have to look. Then came the first rays of sunshine, everything became clearer, lighter, more alive, and I became happier and happier, and then it hung in the sky of my life and shone and shone and shone.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“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 Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“What a stupid, fucking, idiotic country this was. All the young women drank water in such vast quantities that it was coming out of their ears, they thought it was "beneficial" and "healthy," but all it did was send the numbers of incontinent young people soaring. 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 it didn't matter because it was "beneficial," it was "healthy," it was "wholesome." Oh, they were confusing food with the mind, they thought they could eat their way to being better human beings without understanding that food is one thing and the notions food evokes another. And if you said that, you were either a reactionary or just a Norwegian, in other words ten years behind the times.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“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 Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“It is not the case that we are born equal and that the conditions of life make our lives unequal, it is the opposite, we are born unequal, and the conditions of life make our lives more equal.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“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 Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“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 Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“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 Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“We were rooted in the archaic past, nothing radical about us, our bodies, or needs had changed since the first human saw the light of day somewhere in Africa forty thousand years ago or however long Homo sapiens had existed. But we imagined it was different, and so strong was our imaginative power we not only believed that but we also organized ourselves accordingly, as we sat getting drunk in our cafés and darkened clubs, and dancing our dances that presumably were even more clumsy than those performed, shall we say, twenty-five thousand years ago in the glow of a fire somewhere along the Mediterranean coast.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“From my own childhood I remember only a handful of incidents, all of which I regarded as momentous, but which I now understand were a few events among many, which completely expunges their meaning, for how can I know that those particular episodes that lodged themselves in my mind were decisive, and not all the others of which I remember nothing?”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“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 Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“Everything that can be said with words can be contradicted with words, so what’s the point of dissertations, novels, literature? Or put another way: whatever we say is true we can also always say is untrue. It is a zero point and the place from which the zero value begins to spread. However, it is not a dead point, not for literature either, for literature is not just words, literature is what words evoke in the reader. It is this transcendence that validates literature, not the formal transcendence in itself, as many believe.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“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 Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“Few things are harder to visualise than that a cold snowbound landscape, so marrow-chillingly quiet and lifeless, will, within mere months, be green and lush and warm, quivering with all manner of life, from birds warbling and flying through the trees to swarms of insects hanging in scattered clusters in the air. Nothing in the winter landscape presages the scent of sun-warmed heather and moss, trees bursting with sap and thawed lakes ready for spring and summer, nothing presages the feeling of freedom that can come over you when the only white that can be seen is the clouds gliding across the blue sky above the blue water of the rivers gently flowing down to the sea, the perfect, smooth, cool surface, broken now and then by rocks, rapids and bathing bodies. It is not there, it does not exist, everything is white and still, and if the silence is broken it is by a cold wind or a lone crow caw-cawing. But it is coming ... it is coming... One evening in March the snow turns to rain, and the piles of snow collapse. One morning in April there are buds on the trees, and there is a trace of green in the yellow grass. Daffodils appear, white and blue anemones too. Then the warm air stands like a pillar among the trees on the slopes. On sunny inclines buds have burst, here and there cherry trees are in blossom. If you are sixteen years old all of this makes an impression, all of this leaves its mark, for this is the first spring you know is spring, with all your sense you know this is spring, and it is the last, for all coming springs pale in comparison with your first. If, moreover, you are in love, well, then ... then it is merely a question of holding on. Holding on to all the happiness, all the beauty, all the future that resides in everything.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“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 Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“I walked around Stockholm’s streets, modern and feminized, with a furious nineteenth-century man inside me.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“Döden gör livet meningslöst för att allt vi någonsin har strävat efter upphör med den, och den gör livet meningsfullt för att dess närvaro gör det lilla vi har av det omistligt, gör varje ögonblick dyrbart.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“Attributing to another author, "Writing a novel is like setting a goal and walking there in your sleep.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“At the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. When you were forty you realized it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless you did something. Unless you took one last gamble.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“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 Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“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 Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“But can’t I sleep here while you’re working?’
‘You know I won’t be able to. I can’t even write with a cat in the room.’
‘You’ve never tried with me in the room. I may have a good effect.’
Even though I was angry I couldn’t bring myself to say no. I had no right to be because what I was implying was that the miserable manuscript I was writing was more important than her. At that moment it was, but I couldn’t say that.
‘OK,’ I said.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“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 Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“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 Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

“When I was outdoors, walking, like now, what I saw gave me nothing. Snow was snow, trees were trees. It was only when I saw a picture of snow or of trees that they were endowed with meaning. Monet had an exceptional eye for light on snow, which Thaulow, perhaps technically the most gifted Norwegian painter ever, also had. It was a feast for the eyes, the closeness of the moment was so great that the value of what gave rise to it increased exponentially, an old tumbledown cabin by a river or a pier at a holiday resort suddenly became priceless, the paintings were charged with the feeling that they were here at the same time as us, in this intense here and now, and that we would soon be gone from them, but with regard to the snow, it was as if the other side of this cultivation of the moment became visible, the animation of this and its light so obviously ignored something, namely the lifelessness, the emptiness, the non-charged and the neutral, which were the first features to strike you when you entered a forest in winter, and in the picture, which was connected with perpetuity and death, the moment was unable to hold its ground.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2

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Popular quotes

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This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.”
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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.