Quotes by "Karl Ove Knausgård"

Only what slips through one's fingers, only what is never expressed in words, has no thoughts, exists completely. That is the price of proximity: you don't see it. Don't know that it's there. Then it is over, then you see it.

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.

The name has always occupied a space between the concrete and the abstract, the individual and the social, but when it begins to be shaped and charged with meaning in places removed from the physical world, in that way entertaining the world of fiction, albeit unseen by the majority, at the same time as this fictional world is expanding and taking up an ever greater part of our lives - the TV screens are now not only in our own rooms, but also on the walls of our trains and under the luggage bins of our planes, in the waiting rooms of our doctors' offices and the halls of our banks, even in the supermarkets, quite apart from our carrying them around in the form of laptop computers and cell phones, in such a way that we inhabit two realities, one abstract and image-based, in which all kinds of people and places present themselves before us with nothing in common but being somewhere other than where we are, and one concrete, physical, which is the one we move around in and are more palpably a part of - when we arrive at a point where everything is either fiction or seen as fiction, the job of the novelist can no longer be to write more fiction.

The number of people we come close to during our lives is small, and we fail to realise how infinitely important each and every one of them is to us until we grow older and can see things from afar. When I was sixteen, I thought that life was without end, the number of people in it inexhaustible. This was by no means strange, since right from starting school at the age of seven I’d been surrounded by hundreds of children and adults; people were a renewable resource, found in abundance, but what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day i would look back on my life and this would be what I looked back on. What then had been insignificant, as weightless as air, a series of events dissolving in exactly the same way as the darkness dissolved in the mornings, would twenty years on seem laden with destiny and fate.

And it's a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.

The tree was so old, and stood there so alone, that his childish heart had been filled with compassion; if no one else on the farm gave it a thought, he would at least do his best to, even though he suspected that his child's words and child's deeds didn't make much difference. It had stood there before he was born, and would be standing there after he was dead, but perhaps, even so, it was pleased that he stroked its bark every time he passed, and sometimes, when he was sure he wasn't observed, even pressed his cheek against it.

A memory is a ledge on the mountainside of the mind; there we are, drinking and chatting, and on the ledge below us my dad sits in his chair, dead, his face smeared with blood.

À medida que perspectiva do mundo se amplia, não diminui apenas a dor que ela causa, mas também o significado que tem. Compreender o mundo exige que se mantenha uma certa distância dele. Ampliamos coisas que são demasiado pequenas para serem vistas a olho nu, como moléculas e átomos. Reduzimos coisas que são demasiados grandes, como nuvens, deltas de rios e constelações. Só fixamos o mundo quando o temos ao alcance dos nossos sentidos. A essa fixação chamamos conhecimento. Durante a nossa infância e juventude lutamos para manter a distância correta das coisas e dos fenómenos. Lemos aprendemos, experimentamos, corrigimos. Então, um dia, chegamos ao ponto em que todas as distâncias necessárias foram determinadas, todos os sistemas necessários foram estabelecidos. É aí que o tempo começa a acelerar. Já não encontra qualquer obstáculo, está tudo determinado, o tempo passa rapidamente pelas nossas vidas, os dias sucedem-se num piscar de olhos, e , antes que nos apercebamos do que está a acontecer, temos quarenta, cinquenta, sessenta anos... O sentido requer conteúdo, o conteúdo requer tempo, o tempo requer resistência. O conhecimento é distância, o conhecimento é estagnação e inimigo do sentido.