Quotes by Norwegian Authors - Page 3

We all need somebody to talk to. It would be good if we talked ... not just pitter-patter but real talk. We shouldn't be so afraid because most people really like this contact that you show you are vulnerable makes them free to be vulnerable.
Liv Ullmann
My helpless friend your helplessness is the most powerful plea which rises up to the tender father-heart of God. You think that everything is closed to you because you cannot pray. My friend your helplessness is the very essence of prayer.
O. Hallesby
And what if I did run my ship aground oh still it was splendid to sail it!
Henrik Ibsen
One loss is good for the soul. Too many losses are not good for the coach.
Knute Rockne
Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.
Thorstein Veblen
Now I am steel-set: I follow the call to the clear radiance and glow of the heights.
Henrik Ibsen
Show me a good and gracious loser and I'll show you a failure.
Knute Rockne
All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to a judicious use of sabotage.
Thorstein Veblen
Culture is something you cannot buy something you cannot import something you cannot learn or produce at will. A writer an artist or musician cannot sit down and say 'Now I will produce culture.' Culture is something that evolves out of the simple enduring elements of everyday life elements most truthfully expressed in the folk arts and crafts of a nation.
Thor Hansen
To ask why we need libraries at all, when there is so much information available elsewhere, is about as sensible as asking if roadmaps are necessary now that there are so very many r
Jon Bing
Nothing happens. And by that I mean nothing.
Ida Løkås
in order to isolate what was possible, you had to eliminate everything that was impossible
Jo Nesbø
Be yourself!’ said Gro. ‘No one will hear any of you otherwise, still less trust you. That’s the most important thing of all. If you’re not yourself you just can’t sustain it in the long term.
Åsne Seierstad
People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.
Jostein Gaarder
Cage an eagle and it will bite at the wires, be they ofiron or of gold.
Henrik Ibsen
A utopia cannot, by definition, include boredom, but the ‘utopia’ we are living in is boring.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
Animals can be understimulated, but hardly bored.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
One mood can be replaced by another, but it is impossible to leave attunement altogether. However, profound boredom brings us as close to a state of un-attunement as we can come.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
Anthropocentrism gave rise to boredom, and when anthropomorphism was replaced by technocentrism, boredom became even more profound.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
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.
Karl Ove Knausgård
Never forget to put the beneficiaries on top of your organogram!
Geir Furuseth
What is worse? Taking the life of a person who wants to live or taking death from a person who wants to die.
Jo Nesbø
Balance is of the essence,' she said. 'That appies to all good, harmonious relationships. Balance in guilt, balance in shame and pangs of conscience.
Jo Nesbø
Chernobyl, an accident or the most successful anti-Marxist attack in recorded history?
Anders Breivik
Ricin - Death by diarrhea
Anders Breivik
I was the kind to endure. No one had said you couldn’t become a better person through endurance.
Knausgaard
Under a bad leadership Serbs are capable of committing the most terrible atrocities; under good leaders we can do great deeds. It's like a field - if it's not cared for, the weeds will take over. But if you tend it, water and feed the seeds, you will read a bountiful harvest. Serbs are lazy, we lack discipline and have no capacity for self-criticism." With Their Backs to the World
Åsne Seierstad
You know someone's okay if they can ignore things they can't do anything about and move on.
Jo Nesbø
The intelligent poor individual was a much finer observer than the intelligent rich one. The poor individual looks around him at every step, listens suspiciously to every word he hears from the people he meets; thus, every step he takes presents a problem, a task, for his thoughts and feelings. He is alert and sensitive, he is experienced, his soul has been burned...
Knut Hamsun
What can you do when everyone around you is strong and clever?
Tarjei Vesaas
God help me, how Tolstoy sweats over drying up people's sources of life, of wild and joyful life, drying them up and making the world fat with the love of God and everyman. ... But the man is old, after all, his fountains of life run dry, without a trace remaining of human affections. ... Only someone who has become slow and watertight with old age, satiated and hardened with pleasure, will go to youth and say, Renounce! ... And yet the youth renounces nothing, but sins royally for forty years. Such is the course of nature!
Knut Hamsun
On the road we're somebody else's guests and we play in a way that they'renot going to forget we visited them.
Knute Rockne
Build up your weaknesses until they become your strong points.
Knute Rockne
Does this mean that religious consumption will increase online? That could be. We do not know yet, but to expect religion to disappear because of online technology is like expecting people to stop listening to music because Napster, Spotify and Wimp are offering us all the music we want online
Torkel Brekke
I may say that this is the greatest factor: the way in which the expedition is equipped, the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order, luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time, this is called bad luck.
Roald Amundsen
Take Tom Jones and mix him with Enrico Caruso, the Italian tenor-cum-castrato singer. Then add tons of pathetic love songs, faked sex appeal and musical kleptomania focusing on Western hits from the 1970s. Spice it up with a political flexibility rare even for Central European standards and a personal status close to that of the Pope. What do you get? Karel Gott, Czech pop music's most mega-super, long-lasting and brightest star.
Terje B. Englund
Logically, when Maestro Gott some years ago, after an especially cruel critic had compared him to "a zombie who causes acute depression to innocent radio listeners", decided to stop performing in protest, the situation was considered so grave that the Minister of Culture himself went to console the deeply insulted star.
Terje B. Englund
While I think of it, Mr. Werle, junior — don't use that foreign word: ideals. We have the excellent native word: lies.
Henrik Ibsen
Listen, I am someone who had chosen to earn their daily bread killing other people. I'm inclined to give people a bit of leeway when it comes to their actions and decisions.
Jo Nesbø
Bjarne Møller, my former boss, says people like me always choose the line of most resistance. It's in what he calls our 'accursed nature'. That's why we always end up on our own. I don't know. I like being alone. Perhaps I have grown to like my self-image of being a loner, too....I think you have to find something about yourself that you like in order to survive. Some people say being alone is unsociable and selfish. But you're independent and you don't drag others down with you, if that's the way you're heading. Many people are afraid of being alone. But it made me feel strong, free and invulnerable.
Jo Nesbø
Ghosts! […] I almost think we are all of us ghosts. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that ‘walks’ in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.
Henrik Ibsen
It's not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them.
Henrik Ibsen
Politics is the application of Sufism to earthlife...To refuse to act politically is to starve your children, destroy civilization.
Shamcher Bryn Beorse
A great White Bear waits outside. He has faithfully promised to make us all rich if he can but have our youngest daughter.
Peter Christen Asbjørnsen
Laughter's all the damned thing's fit for.
Henrik Ibsen
I don’t care what other people think about me. Most people are idiots, and they can think whatever they want.
Ida Løkås
There was a gay man who lived nearby when I was growing up,’ Harry recounted. ‘He must have been forty or so, lived alone, and everyone in the neighbourhood knew he was gay. In the winter we threw snowballs at him, shouted “buttfucker” then ran like mad, convinced he would give us one up the backside if he caught us. But he never came after us, just pulled his hat further down over his ears and walked home. One day, suddenly, he moved. He never did anything to me, and I’ve always wondered why I hated him so much.’‘People are afraid of what they don’t understand. And hate what they’re afraid of.
Jo Nesbø
And before me the empty table at the Theater Café with my reservation - Barnum Nilsen, 8PM - the only table no one sits at. And this too is an echo, an echo of time, the shadows of a discus spinning through blinding sunlight.
Lars Saabye Christensen
We do not disappear without a trace. We leave a wake that never quite disappears, a gash in time that we so laboriously leave behind us.
Lars Saabye Christensen
The meaning is hidden in man, but it is only man himself who can find it.
Liv-Christine Hoem
The story goes that one day Socrates stood gazing at a stall that sold allkinds of wares. Finally he said, “What a lot of things I don’t need!
Jostein Gaarder
Bewilderment increases in the presence of the mirrors.
Tarjei Vesaas
«Zaki never grew tired of looking at the whiteness of Roar’s hair. It was as if the moon and the stars had taken root in it. And perhaps they had, so long ago when Roar travelled amongst them in his space shuttle.»From "The Stars Seem So Far Away
Margrét Helgadóttir
But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore, it is madness. Alone I confront them and tell them that nothing could be saner or truer! What do people really know about life? We fall in line, follow the pattern established by our mentors. Everything is based on assumptions; even time, space, motion, matter are nothing but supposition. The world has no new knowledge to impart; it merely accepts what is there.
Knut Hamsun
His face was neither handsome nor anything else. It just was.
Tarjei Vesaas
Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.
Peter Wessel Zapffe
Another flaw of the system is the fact that various danger fronts often require very different firmaments. As a logical superstructure is built upon each, there follow clashes of incommensurable modes of feeling and thought. Then despair can enter through the rifts. In such cases, a person may be obsessed with destructive joy, dislodging the whole artificial apparatus of his life and starting with rapturous horror to make a clean sweep of it. The horror stems from the loss of all sheltering values, the rapture from his by now ruthless identification and harmony with our nature’s deepest secret, the biological unsoundness, the enduring disposition for doom.
Peter Wessel Zapffe
– The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.– The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?– But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.– Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.
Peter Wessel Zapffe
We look for pretty girls we can say bad things to. No one shows up.
Ida Løkås
. We have this attitude that people become drug addicts against their will. That they couldn’t possibly want this kind of life. But maybe that’s not true. Maybe they don’t want to live like other people — it just wouldn’t suit them.
Jo Nesbø