Knausgaard Quotes

Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight?

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.

Writing is more about destroying than creating" (195).

For life, it's very, very bad to be sensitive, but for a writer, it's very good.

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. The yellow-red leaves lying wet and smooth on the flagstones between the houses. How the stone darkens when it rains, lightens as it dries.

I can’t speak for other writers, but I write to create something that is better than myself, I think that’s the deepest motivation, and it is so because I’m full of self-loathing and shame. Writing doesn’t make me a better person, nor a wiser and happier one, but the writing, the text, the novel, is a creation of something outside of the self, an object, kind of neutralized by the objectivity of literature and form; the temper, the voice, the style; all in it is carefully constructed and controlled. This is writing for me: a cold hand on a warm forehead.

It is never easy to confront life-changing news, especially when you are deeply embroiled in the everyday and the banal, which we always are. They absorb almost everything, make almost everything small, apart from the few events that are so immense that they lay waste to all the everyday trivia around you.

What is literature an expression of, if not an otherwise inaccessible and in reality non-existent closeness?

I had gained an insight. At great expense, but it was real and important: I was not a writer. What writers had, I did not have. I fought against this insight, I told myself I might be able to have what writers had, it might be attainable provided I persisted for long enough, while knowing in fact this was only a consolation. - Karl Ove Knausgaard, after his year at the Bergen Writing Academy

The heart is always right. It never errs. The heart never errs. The heart never ever errs.

Even though the suitcase was heavy I carried it by the handle as I walked into the departure hall. I detested the tiny wheels, first of all because they were feminine, thus not worthy of a man, a man should carry, not roll, secondly because they suggested easy options, shortcuts, savings, rationality, which I despised and opposed wherever I could, even where it was of the most trivial significance. Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight? Were we just images? And what were we actually saving energy for with these energy-saving devices?

It is often windy here, the great sails of wind that build up over the ocean meet no obstacles and come rushing in over the land, but today it was perfectly still, the light stood motionless in the air, and all the muted colours unfolded calmly in it.

I saw life; I thought about death.

For who brooded over the meaninglessness of life anymore? Teenagers. They were the only ones who were preoccupied with existential issues, and as a result there was something puerile and immature about them, and hence it was doubly impossible for adults with their sense of propriety intact to deal with them. However, this is not so strange for we never feel more strongly and passionately about life than in our teenage years, when we step into the world for the first time, as it were, and all our feelings are new feelings. So there they are, with their big ideas on small orbits, looking this way and that for an opportunity to launch them, as the pressure builds. And who is it they light upon sooner or later but Uncle Dostoevsky.

I had always liked staying the night with other families, having your own room with a freshly made bed, full of unfamiliar objects, with a towel and a washcloth nicely laid out, and from there straight into the heart of family life, despite there always being, no matter whom I visited, an uncomfortable side, because even though people always try to keep existing tensions in the background whenever guests are present, the tensions are still noticeable, and you can never know if it is your presence that has caused them or whether they are just there and indeed your presence is helping to suppress them. A third possibility is, of course, that all these tensions were just tensions that lived their own lives in my head.

I hardly knew I had these thoughts, they lived in a kind of no-man’s-land, and when they came, in an explosion, I didn’t hold on to them, I let them fall back to where they’d come from, and so it was as though they didn’t exist. But what Jørn had said, that changed everything, because that came from the outside. Everything that came from the outside was dangerous.

I am alive, I have my own children and with them I have tried to achieve only one aim: that they shouldn’t be afraid of their father. They aren’t. I know that. When I enter a room, they don’t cringe, they don't look down at the floor, they don’t dart off as soon as they glimpse an opportunity, no, if they look at me, it is not a look of indifference, and if there is anyone I am happy to be ignored by it is them. If there is anyone I am happy to be taken for granted by, it is them. And should they have completely forgotten I was there when they turn forty themselves, I will thank them and take a bow and accept the bouquets.

Was it Jesus you saw a picture of?” he says and looks up at me. If it had not been for the friendly voice and the long pause before the question, I would have thought he was making fun of me. He finds it a little embarrassing that I am a Christian; all he wants is for me not to be different from the other kids, and of all the kids in the neighbourhood, his youngest son is the only one to call himself a Christian. But he is really wondering about this. I feel a flutter of joy because he actually cares, and at the same time I become a bit offended that he underestimates me like that. I shake my head. “It wasn’t Jesus,” I say.

For it isn't the pupils you are seeing then, not the irises nor the whites of the eyes. It is the soul, the archaic light of the soul the eyes are filled with, and to gaze into the eyes of the one you love when love is at its most powerful belongs among the highest joys.

Jeg er hans sønn. Historien om ham, Kai Åge Knausgård, er historien om meg, Karl Ove Knausgård. Den har jeg fortalt. Jeg har overdrevet, jeg har lagt til, jeg har trukket fra, og det er mye jeg ikke har forstått. Men det er ikke ham jeg har beskrevet, det er mitt bilde av ham. Det er ferdig nå.

I had never imagined that happiness could hurt so much.

I was the son of the man who had ruined everything.

I was the kind to endure. No one had said you couldn’t become a better person through endurance.

It was such a terrible time. I knew so little, had such ambitions and achieved nothing. But what spirits I was in before I went!

And that the death we carry within us, which Rilke compares to a fruit, grows inside us until ripe, and is in other words alive, belonging to life itself.

Letters are nothing but dead signs, and books are their coffins.

I want to show you the world, as it is, all around us, all the time. Only by doing so will I myself be able to glimpse it.

Our spirits rose after a few beers, all that lay between us during the day, the silences that could develop from nowhere, the irritation that could set in, the sudden inability to find areas of common interest, even though there were so many, all of that vanished as our spirits soared and we felt the concomitant warmth: we looked at each other and knew who we were.

Here he stands before me as he was, in midlife, and perhaps that is why reading them is so painful for me, he wasn’t only much more than my feelings for him but infinitely more, a complete and living person in the midst of his life.

few things are a more satisfying substitute for the presence of other people than writing, which at the same time provides an excuse for one's antisocial behaviour, for everyone knows that someone who writes has a great need for solitude.

Mood isn't a particular thought or a particular part of the brain, nor in a particular part of the body, such as a foot or an ear, it is everywhere, but nothing in itself, more like a colour in which thoughts are thought, a colour through which the world is seen.

Until I moved to Stockhold I had felt there was a continuity to my life, as if it stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together by new connections, in a complex and ingenious pattern in which every phenomenon I saw was capable of evoking a memory which unleashed small landslides of feeling in me, some with a known source, others without. The people I encountered came from towns I had been to, they knew other people I had met, it was a network, and it was a tight mesh. But when I moved to Stockholm this flaring up of memories became rarer and rarer, and one day it ceased altogether. That is, I could still remember; what happened was that the memories no longer stirred anything in me. No longing, no wish to return, nothing. Just the memory, and a barely perceptible hint of an aversion to anything that was connected with it.

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.

Asbjørn had a nose, that was his great talent, I had never met anyone with such sureness of taste as him, but what use was it, part from being the hub student life revolved around? The essence of a nose is judgment, to judge you have to stand outside, and that is not where creativity takes place.

so much of what we see lies in the name; that is an apple tree, that is an elm, that is a cherry tree, that is a spruce. If we look at it for longer, we might get beneath the name and see it as a unique, singular tree and not merely as a representative of the category it belongs to. And eventually we may even be able to see what it 'is', its presence in the world. But by then we will have come to know it so well that it will seem familiar to us, which in turn creates a distance, for that's how it is with the familiar, isn't it, friends we've known for years - we no longer see them, we just note their presence, allowing it to fill the category we have created for them.

The structure of the ideal novel. It's an idea by Thure Erik Lund, an untranslated (as of 2016)Norwegian author. It is mentioned in at least two interviews with Karl-Ove Knausgaard: Among the writers he’d like to see translated are Kristine Naess, Cathrine Knudsen, and Thure Erik Lund. Of Lund, Knausgaard says, “his literature is wild, megalomanic, dystopic, and breathtakingly original. I once interviewed him, and he revealed his idea of the perfect novel, which should start in the familiar and gradually lead the reader into more and more unfamiliar areas, until the end, which should be in Chinese, in such a way that the reader doesn’t notice that she had learned it during the reading.” And: You wouldn’t have read him, there’s a Norwegian writer, Thure Erik Lund, he’s the greatest prose writer in my generation. He’s ten years older than me. He’s very wild. His novels start in one place and end up somewhere completely different. His dream novel, he told me, was a novel that starts here and ends up in Chinese, and the readers should have learned Chinese by the time they got to the end. He’s untranslatable. In one of his books, there’s no people in it, it’s completely empty, but it still works, it’s just great. In Norway, Lund was the only expansive writer I knew of. And there was the example of Marcel Proust — his are books that just grow.

It feels like I have started something new, something quite different, and that is this family. I think of it every day, that what matters is now, that the years we are living through now are when everything important happens. My previous life seems more and more distant. I am no longer preoccupied with my own childhood. Not interested in my student years, my twenties. All that seems far, far away. And I can imagine how it will be when what is happening now is over, when the children have moved out, the thought that these were the important years, this is when I was alive. Why didn’t I appreciate it while I had it? Because then, I sometimes think, I hadn’t had it yet. Only what slips through one’s fingers, only what is never expressed in words… 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.

But the moment I was alone others meant nothing to me. It wasn't that I disliked them, or nurtured feelings of loathing for them; on the contrary, I liked most of them, and the ones I didn't actually like I could always see some worth in, some attribute I could identify with, or at least find interesting, something which could occupy my mind for the moment. But liking them was not the same as caring about them. It was the social situation that bound me, the people within it did not.

When, shortly afterward, I stopped at the top of the hill and saw the town beneath me, my feeling of happiness was so ecstatic that I didn’t know how I would be able to make it home, sit there and write, eat, or sleep. But the world is constructed in such a way that it meets you halfway in moments precisely like these, your inner joy seeks an outer counterpart and finds it, it always does, even in the bleakest regions of the world, for nothing is as relative as beauty. Had the world been different, in my opinion, without mountains and oceans, plains and seas, deserts and forests, and consisted of something else, inconceivable to us, as we don’t know anything other than this, we would also have found it beautiful. A world with gloes and raies, evanbillits and conulames, for example, or ibitera, proluffs, and lopsits, whatever they might be, we would have sung their praises because that is the way we are, we extol the world and love it although it’s not necessary, the world is the world, it’s all we have. So as I walked down the steps toward the town center on this Wednesday at the end of August I had a place in my heart for everything I beheld. A slab of stone worn smooth in a flight of steps: fantastic. A swaybacked roof side by side with an austere perpendicular brick building: so beautiful. A limp hot-dog wrapper on a drain grille, which the wind lifts a couple of meters and then drops again, this time on the pavement flecked with white stepped-on chewing gum: incredible. A lean old man hobbling along in a shabby suit carrying a bag bulging with bottles in one hand: what a sight. The world extended its hand, and I took it.

We come from far away, from terrifying beauty, for a newborn child who opens its eyes for the first time is like a star, is like a sun, but we live our lives amid pettiness and stupidity, in the world of burned hot dogs and wobbly camping tables. The great and terrifying beauty does not abandon us, it is there all the time, in everything that is always the same, in the sun and the stars, in the bonfire and the darkness, in the blue carpet of flowers beneath the tree. It is of no use to us, it is too big for us, but we can look at it, and we can bow before it.

There is a sort of light surrounding Abel, something pure and strong radiates from him no matter where he is or what he's doing. Sometimes Cain thinks he possesses a soul without shadows. That's what people want to be close to. But if so, it's not like a child's, for a child's soul is delicate, its flickering flame needs no more than the opening of a door onto the world to blow it out. Nothing can destroy Abel's light. In his presence one never feels wicked, only foolish. That darkness which in solitude can seem so powerful, occasionally even intoxicating, seems risible in his company.

Who I am to them I have no idea, probably a vague memory of someone they once knew in their childhood years, for they have done so much to one another in their lives since then, so much has happened and with such impact that the small incidents that took place in their childhoods have no more gravity than the dust stirred up by a passing car, or the seeds of a withering dandelion dispersed by the breath from a small mouth. And oh, wasn't the latter a fine image, of how event after event is dispersed in the air above the little meadow of one's own history, only to fall between the blades of grass and vanish?

I read a heap of books to prepare to write my own. Valuable works about art crime include The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick, Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian, The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser, Possession by Erin Thompson, Crimes of the Art World by Thomas D. Bazley, Stealing Rembrandts by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg, Crime and the Art Market by Riah Pryor, The Art Stealers by Milton Esterow, Rogues in the Gallery by Hugh McLeave, Art Crime by John E. Conklin, The Art Crisis by Bonnie Burnham, Museum of the Missing by Simon Houpt, The History of Loot and Stolen Art from Antiquity Until the Present Day by Ivan Lindsay, Vanished Smile by R. A. Scotti, Priceless by Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman, and Hot Art by Joshua Knelman. Books on aesthetic theory that were most helpful to me include The Power of Images by David Freedberg, Art as Experience by John Dewey, The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee, Pictures & Tears by James Elkins, Experiencing Art by Arthur P. Shimamura, How Art Works by Ellen Winner, The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton, and Collecting: An Unruly Passion by Werner Muensterberger. Other fascinating art-related reads include So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgaard, What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy, History of Beauty edited by Umberto Eco, On Ugliness also edited by Umberto Eco, A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar, Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art by Clive Bell, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe, and Intentions by Oscar Wilde—which includes the essay “The Critic as Artist,” written in 1891, from which this book’s epigraph was lifted.

All that usually drew my eyes in his direction, for our entire life together, everything he had done, been, and said, that which made up “Dad” and was immanent in him, or in my view of him, whatever his appearance, all that was suddenly gone. He looked like a drunk who had put on a suit. He looked like an alcoholic his family had picked up, cleaned up, and taken along.

this was not the end of the world, actually it was the world.

the trivial incidents that make up all lives and can suddenly shine bright in the dusk of meaninglessness: the door goes, she comes home, bends over and takes off her shoes, looks at me and smiles, her face is magical and childlike. She pours paint from a five-liter can into a small receptacle, climbs up on a chair and starts painting the molding over the window, wearing a workman’s overalls stained with paint. She snuggles up to me on the sofa, we watch a film, tears run down her cheeks, I laugh at her and she laughs through her tears. There are thousands of such moments, lost the second they occur, yet still present because they are what form a relationship, the particular way we stayed together, which was the same as everyone’s, though different, it was her and me, no one else, it was us, we dealt with everything that came at us as well as we could, but the darkness in me thickened, the joy in me evaporated, I no longer knew what I wanted or what to do, only that I was standing still, I was stuck, this was how it felt, as though I wasn’t formed on the inside, it was only a mold shaped by everything on the outside.

Not the existential kind of darkness that was all about life and death, overarching happiness or overarching grief, but the smaller kind, the shadow on the soul, the ordinary man's private little hell, so inconsequential as to barely deserve mention, while at the same time engulfing everything.

Knausgaard alternates between periods of intense reading and not reading at all; the mountains of books are, he says, largely aspirational. He classifies them into three categories: books he wants to read, books he has to read, and books he feels he ought to read. In the last, unchanging category—which he calls the superego heap—you’ll find a large number of books on philosophy.

Dostoyevsky has become a teenager’s writer, the issue of nihilism a teenage issue.

Av jord var de kommet, til jord skulle de bli, og i de få årene livet levde i dem, var det fra jorden det hentet sin kraft. Den eneste veien ut av det, var lenger inn i det. Lavt er pliktens himmel hvelvet, men det er en himmel. Under den gikk Lamek, og der fant han sin mening. Denne meningen hadde en fiende, det var lengselen etter noe annet, og den bekjempet han med det eneste middelet han kjente: mer arbeid. Arbeidet var således både flukten, og det han flyktet fra.

The countryside around us changed again. Now we were driving through forest. Sørland forests with mountain crags here and there among the trees, hills covered with spruce and oaks, aspen and birch, sporadic dark moorland, sudden meadows, flatland with densely growing pine trees. When I was a boy I used to imagine the sea rising and filling the forest so that the hilltops became islets you could sail between and on which you could bathe. Of all my childhood fantasies this was the one that captivated me most; the thought that you could swim over bus shelters and roofs, perhaps dive down and glide through a door, up a staircase, into a living room. Or just through a forest, with its slopes, cliffs, cairns, and ancient trees. At a certain point in childhood my most exciting game was building dams in streams, watching the water swell and cover the marsh, the roots, the grass, the rocks, the beaten earth path beside the stream. It was hypnotic. Not the mention the cellar we found in an unfinished house filled with shiny, black water we sailed on in two styrofoam boxes, when we were around five years old. Hypnotic. The same applied to winter when we skated along frozen streams in which grass, sticks, twigs, and small plants stood upright in the translucent ice beneath us. What had been the great attraction? And what had happened to it? Another fantasy I had at that time was that there were two enormous saw blades sticking out from the side of the car, chopping off everything as we drove past. Trees and streetlamps, houses and outhouses, but also people and animals. If someone was waiting for a bus they would be sliced through the middle, their top half falling like a felled tree, leaving feet and waist standing and the wound bleeding.

I’ve read some extracts from those idiocies of Knausgaard’s, absolutely intolerable unless the person reading them is riddled with holes,

What was consciousness other than the cone of light from a torch in the middle of dark forest?

We might believe that our world embraced everything, we might do our thing down here on the beach, drive around in our cars, phone each other and chat, visit one another, eat and drive and sit indoors imbibing the faces and opinions and fates of those appearing on the TV screen in this strange, semi-artificial symbiosis we inhabited and lull ourselves for longer and longer, year upon year, into thinking that it was all there was, but if on the odd occasion we were to raise our gaze to this, the only possible thought was one of incomprehension and impotence, for in fact how small and trivial was the world we allowed ourselves to be lured by? Yes, of course, the dramas we saw were magnificent, the images we internalized sublime and sometimes also apocalyptic, but be honest, slaves, what part did we play in them? None.

But love wasn't sensible, love wasn't reasonable, love wasn't appropriate, it was more than that, so for Christ's sake, why not drag up marriage from the mists of time and impose its form on love again? Why not use the big words again? Why not solemnly swear that that we will love each other forever?

As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length, we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty...Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning.

The trick was to eke out the milk because if you came to the last and there was none left it was almost impossible to swallow. Best of all, of course, was to save a drop until everything was eaten, the milk never tasted as good as then, when it no longer had to fulfill a function, kit ran down your throat in its own right, pure and uncontaminated, but unfortunately it was rare for me to manage this. The needs of the moment always trumped promises of the future, however enticing the latter.

I always had a bad conscience whenever vehicles had to stop because of me, a kind of imbalance arose, I felt as though I owed them something. The bigger the vehicle, the worse the guilt. I tried to catch the driver's eye as I crossed so that I could not to restore the balance.

But what do you say to have any impact on a man who at one time admired the Spice Girls? To influence a man who once wrote an enthusiastic essay about the sitcom Friends?

Meaning wasn’t in me, meaning wasn’t in another, meaning arose in the encounter between us.

I believed in dreams, I believed they told you something about life and at a deeper level were always true.

Now there was nothing left of her life, disease had consumed her, eaten up her body, leaving only shaking and fits. It was hard to believe when I saw her sitting there asleep with her mouth agape that her strong will, which couldn't even rule her body now, and her strict morality, which she was no longer able to express, could have left such a deep mark on her children. But it had.

We were getting ready to close the store for what we thought might be as long as two months now. I was looking over the day’s reports when Dissatisfaction came into the building. His fingers roamed along the spines of the books, sometimes tracing one, pulling it out to read the first line. Since he’d read The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald, he and I had compiled a list of short perfect novels. Short Perfect Novels Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabel Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haien Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai These are books that knock you sideways in around 200 pages. Between the covers there exists a complete world. The story is unforgettably peopled and nothing is extraneous. Reading one of these books takes only an hour or two but leaves a lifetime imprint. Still, to Dissatisfaction, they are but exquisite appetizers. Now he needs a meal. I knew that he’d read Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and was lukewarm. He called them soap opera books, which I thought was the point. He did like The Days of Abandonment, which was perhaps a short perfect novel. ‘She walked the edge with that one,’ he said. He liked Knausgaard (not a short perfect). He called the writing better than Novocain. My Struggle had numbed his mind but every so often, he told me, he’d felt the crystal pain of the drill. In desperation, I handed over The Known World. He thrust it back in outrage, his soft voice a hiss, Are you kidding me? I have read this one six times. Now what do you have? In the end, I placated him with Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger, the latest Amitav Ghosh, NW by Zadie Smith, and Jane Gardam’s Old Filth books in a sturdy Europa boxed set, which he hungrily seized. He’d run his prey to earth and now he would feast. Watching him closely after he paid for the books and took the package into his hands, I saw his pupils dilate the way a diner’s do when food is brought to the table.

There, in a hollow in the mountainside I had sat all on my own writing. It felt as if I had arrived at where I wanted to go. I was sitting on a Greek island in the middle of the Mediterranean writing my first novel. At the same time I was restless, there was nothing there, only me, and it wasn't until that was all there was that I experienced the emptiness it entailed. That was how it was there, my own emptiness was everything, and even when I became immersed in 'jack' or was bent over my pad writing about 'gabriel', my protagonist, what I noticed was the emptiness.

A name is like a bag with one's entire identity inside, or like a carrying case. When we die, only the case is left, gathering together all the feelings and thoughts associated with our person.

A person who is everyone is no one, empty. A person who is someone can always become someone else.

reading a good novel is like seeing a landscape emerge when water subsides

I had always liked staying the night with other families, having your own room with a freshly made bed, full of unfamiliar objects, with a towel and facecloth nicely laid out, and from there straight into the heart of family life, despite there always being, no matter whom I visited, an uncomfortable side, because even though people always try to keep any existing tensions in the background whenever guests are present, the tensions are still noticeable, and you can never know if it is your presence that has caused them or whether they are just there and indeed your presence is helping to suppress them.

Now that Nazism has become 'they', it is easy to distance ourselves from it, but this was not the case when Nazism was 'we'. If we are to understand what happened and how it was possible, we must understand this first. And we must understand too that Nazism in its various elements was not monstrous in itself, by which I mean that it did not arise as something obviously monstrous and evil, separate from all else in the current society, but was on the contrary part of that current. The gas chambers were not a German invention, but were conceived by Americans who realised that people could be put to death by placing them in a chamber infused with posionous gas, a procedure they carried out for the first time in 1919. Paranoid anti-Semitism was not a German phenomenon either, the world's most celebrated and passionate anti-Semite in 1925 being not Adolf Hitler but Henry Ford. And racial biology was not an abject, shameful discipline pursued at the bottom of society or its shabby periphery, it was the scientific state of the art, much as genetics is today, haloed by the light of the future and all its hope. Decent humans distanced themselves from all this, but they were few, and this fact demands our consideration, for who are we going to be when our decency is put to the test? Will we have the courage to speak against what everyone else believes, our friends, neighbours and colleagues, to insist that we are decent and they are not? Great is the power of the we, almost inescapable its bonds, and the only thing we can really do is to hope our we is a good we. Because if evil comes it will not come as 'they', in the guise of the unfamiliar that we might turn away without effort, it will come as 'we'. It will come as what is right.

In our world no one had greater status than these workmen; no work seemed more meaningful than theirs. The technical details were of no interest to me, they meant as little as the make of the construction machines. What fascinated me most, apart from the changes in the landscape the workmen wrought, were the manifestations of their private lives that came with them.

... it struck me with a huge sense of relief that I would never be returning, that everything I saw I was seeing for the final time. That the houses and the places that disappeared behind me were also disappearing out of my life, for good. Little did I know then that every detail of this landscape, and every single person living in it, would forever be lodged in my memory with a ring as true as perfect pitch.

I don’t know what is more frightening: a creature on a small planet worshipping itself and its world as if infinity did not exist, or a creature who burns its fellow beings because the infinite does exist.

The way enlightenment became blind to itself, what began as a de-enchantment of reality, designed to make man free and his own master, ending up in re-enchantment, at the same time as progress, with all its advances and technologies, marched on, making man unfree and slavelike, and eventually it collapsed completely.

The truth is we don't know what we're doing. We don't know where it's going to lead. It's a known fact that children of divorce are over-represented in the crime figures, and the younger they were when the parents divorced, the greater the risk of them getting into trouble. But we won't give up the right to divorce, so instead we say it's best for the kids. In any system it's impossible to foresee all effects. To get back to the motor car: if anyone had said that the invention of the motor car was going to kill thousands of people every year, would we have put it into production and centred our lives around it the way we have? No. So we don't talk about that, we say the motor car brings us freedom and opportunity instead. And when capitalism increased its hold and we needed more labour, did anyone say women have got to leave the home now and start producing goods, so we can double the labour force? Not to mention double the numbers of consumers? No, they didn't. That was comen wanting the same rights as men. The right to work, what kind of a right is t hat? How's that supposed to be liberating? It's just the opposite, a prison. The consequence of that is that our kids are farmed out to an institution from the age of two, and what happens then? Mum and dad are almost driven insane, aren't they? They're riddled with guilt, so they spend all the time they can on their kids when they're not at work, trying to be as close to them as possible. Compensation, compensation, compensation.

If we accord the highest value to the life of the individual, if we understand life to be a quantitative concept that must be maintained for as long as possible, then death is our foremost enemy and war becomes absolutely meaningless, absolutely undersirable. If we do not accord the highest value to the life of the individual, but to some element of that life, a property, or to something outside of it, an idea, then we consider life as something qualitative, something more than the sum of cells and living days, in other words we hold that there is something more hallowed than life, and then the equation is simple and one might choose to die for it.

Romanticism is for the one, the individual, and is vertical. Romanticism is a matter between you and God, whereas Shostakovich, now that we’ve mentioned him, and in fact his name suggests itself here, is horizontal, complex, alive.

Nature is a destructive force we permit to control us. Death is a result of our passivity towards nature: we allow nature to kill us.

The mistake we have made is that we have submitted to death, accepting it passively and without question. What we must do is to intervene actively in nature: steer it, control it, conquer it.

Thus, Fyodorov suggests, at some point in time it will be possible to trace every atom that once belonged to a person and to put them all together again.

Why not rise up against it? Why not crush death, that great oppressor? Why not organise a revolution of life? Why not let our dead be the last to be dead, and from now on become the eternally living? Yes, I know: impossible. But what if it isn’t?

Working all the time,” writes Karl Ove Knausgaard, “is also a way to simplify life, to parry its demands, especially the demand to be happy.

I felt the impact of time, it came like a blow, and even though I knew that changes happened gradually, that moment crept up on me, when what had been behind me, a long time behind me, suddenly felt like a thing of the past. That past was real, it wasn’t unreal, it wasn’t dead, but it was behind me, further and further, in other words, I was growing old.

The priest who once supervised me as a student had once said to me that a person only has to step sideways for everything to look different. He'd been talking about the priest's role as a director of souls. I don't know why I remembered it so vividly, because he said all sorts of clever things, but I reasoned it was because it was true, and because it was something I needed to know and thus found significant. People disappeared into their own lives and conflicts, and in doing so they lost perspective, not only on where they were, but also on who they were, and who they had been or could become. But stepping sideways in one's own life was well nigh impossible.

Discard her, find a new one, discard her. Rise and be ruthless, a seducer of women, a man they all wanted but none could have. I put the music magazines in a heap on the bottom of my bookshelves and went downstairs. Mom was sitting and talking on the telephone in the clothes room, the door was open, she smiled at me. I stood still for a few seconds to hear who she was talking to. One of her sisters.

Without language the world would become overgrown: every single word is like a little clearing.

Time is distance, and when it is suspended, we are no longer in the world but a part of the world.

Geir gave me the chance to look at life and understand it, Linda gave me the chance to live it. In the first instance I became visible to myself, in the second I vanished. That's the difference between friendship and love.

Only by forgetting that one is writing can one write and give an external expression to the internal thought without it being marked or prevented by shame, as all other external expressions are.

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. Now and then I did buy them, when it felt as though a bit more trash up there wouldn't make any difference.

The difference between this painting and the others the late Rembrandt painted is the difference between seeing and being seen. That is, in this picture he sees himself seeing while also being seen, and no doubt it was only in the Baroque period with its penchant for mirrors within mirrors, the play within the play, staged scenes and a belief in the interdependence of all things, when moreover craftsmanship attained heights witnessed neither before nor since, that such a painting was possible. But it exists in our age, it sees for us.

English was my worst subject, and I was only two years older than the oldest pupils, so while I was walking over to the other building, where the eighth and ninth forms had their classroom, my stomach was churning again. I put my pile of books down on the raised table. The pupils were scattered across their desks as if they had just been hurled out of a spin dryer. No one paid any attention to me. ‘Hello, class!’ I said. ‘My name is Karl Ove Knausgaard, and I’m going to be your English teacher this year. How do you do?’ No one said anything. The class consisted of four boys and five girls. A couple of them watched me, the others sat scribbling something, one was knitting. I recognised the boy from the snack bar stand: he was wearing a baseball cap and rocking back and forth on his chair while eyeing me with a smirk on his face. He had to be Stian. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Now I would like you to introduce yourselves in English.’ ‘Snakk norsk!’ Stian said in Norwegian. The boy behind him, a conspicuously tall, thin figure, taller than me, and I was one metre ninety-four, guffawed. Some of the girls tittered. ‘If you are going to learn a language, then you have to talk it,’ I said. One of the girls, dark-haired and white-skinned, with regular, slightly chubby facial features and blue eyes, put up her hand. ‘Yes?’ I said. ‘Isn’t your English a bit too bad? I mean, for teaching?’ I could feel my cheeks burning, I stepped forward with a smile to hide my embarrassment.

The job of the terrorists was to penetrate into our subconscious. This had always been the aim of writers, but the terrorists took it a step further. They were the writers of our age. Don DeLillo said this many years before 9/11. The images they created spread around the globe, colonising our our subconscious minds. The tangible outcome of the attack, the numbers of dead and injured, the material destruction, meant nothing. It was the images that were important. The more iconic the images they managed to create, the more successful their actions. The attack on the World Trade Centre was the most successful of all time. There weren’t that many dead, only a couple of thousand, as against the six hundred thousand who died in the first two days of the Battle Of Flanders in the autumn of 1914, yet the images were so iconic and powerful that the effect on us was just as devastating, perhaps more so, since we lived in a culture of images. Planes and skyscrapers. Icarus and Babel. They wanted into our dreams. Everyone did. Our inner beings were the final market. Once they were conquered, we would be sold.

My Struggle series by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

[I felt] a huge sense of relief . . . that the houses and the places that disappeared behind me were also disappearing out of my life, for good. Little did I know then that every detail of this landscape, and every single person living in it, would forever be lodged in my memory with a ring as true as perfect pitch.

...for what is the pipe that leads to the water tap other than an extension of the gullet, the pipe that leads out from the toilet bowl an extension of the colon and the urethra, the cable that transports images to the TV an extension of the brain? We live within this web of pipes and cables, and whether we are free depends on whether in this web we are like the spider or rather like the spider's prey.

When the snow-covered forest lies motionless beneath the faintly darkening sky, it is completely still. If it then begins to snow and the air fills with snowflakes, it is still completely silent, bu the silence is different, it seems to grow denser, more concentrated, and that sound, which is no sound, only a nuance of silence, a kind of intensifying or deepening of it, is the sonic expression of winter’s essence.

Everything that is beyond reason is subsumed under God, whose name may not be spoken since God is also beyond language, but is still present within us, since we are created in God’s image. A relationship exists, there is no language for it, and when we submit to God that is what we feel, an unimaginable depth of feeling which connects us with everything that exists, everything that was and everything that will be. But what has once been learned cannot be unlearned. Now we live in atomic reality, and we are alone in the world.

There was nothing left of my feelings for those I had just spent several hours with. The whole crowd of them could have burned in hell for all I cared.

Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, take the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrative is autobiography.

I returned the glass to the table and stubbed out my cigarette. There was nothing left of my feelings for those I had just spent several hours with. The whole crowd of them could have burned in hell for all I cared. This was a rule in my life. When I was with other people I was bound to them, the nearness I felt was immense, the empathy great. Indeed, so great that their well-being was always more important than my own. I subordinated myself, almost to the verge of self-effacement; some uncontrollable internal mechanism caused me to put their thoughts and opinions before mine. But the moment I was alone others meant nothing to me . . . Between these two perspectives there was no halfway point. There was just the small, self-effacing one and the large, distance-creating one. And in between them was where my daily life lay. Perhaps that was why I had such a hard time living it. Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or that made me happy. This had nothing to do with a lack of desire to wash floors or change diapers but rather with something more fundamental: the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.