My Struggle Knausgaard Quotes

I saw life; I thought about death.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

I sat beside her and opened the book. It was about a caterpillar that ate everything in sight.

A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and parking lots, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way

The house seemed different then, when she was in it, and the strange thing was that I could feel it; if, for example, I had gone to sleep before she returned and I awoke in the middle of the night, I could sense she was there, something in the atmosphere had changed without my being able to put my finger on quite what it was, except to say that it had a reassuring effect.

My room was untouched, I grabbed what I needed, and although I had planned to sleep there I went back to town. Something unfamiliar had descended over all the things in the house.

Drinking was good for me; it set things in motion. And I was thrust into something, a feeling of … not infinity exactly, but of, well, something unlimited. Something I could go into, deeper and deeper. The feeling was so sharp and distinct.

Grandad got up and walked over to the window, stood with his hands behind his back peering out.

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.

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.

My Struggle series by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

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.

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.

My palms were sweaty.