Quotes by Norwegian Authors - Page 7

On the one hand we need the image of "the text" in order to focus on anything at all; on the other hand we use the metaphor of "reading" to signal that our apprehension of a text will always be partial, that we never quite reach the "text itself," a realization that has led certain critics to question the very existence of such an object.
Espen J. Aarseth
Sometimes when you read, it’s like certain sentences strike home and knock you flat. It’s as if they say everything you have tried to say, or tried to do, or everything you are.
Gunnhild Øyehaug
A composition—and every work of art is one—is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process.
Jostein Gaarder
Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.
Edvard Munch
I still don't know if things fit together, or if everything will be all right in the end. But I believe that something means something. I believe in cleansing the soul through fun and games. I also believe in love. And I have several good friends, and just one bad one.
Erlend Loe
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.
Karl Ove Knausgård
Perhaps that was a thing about attractive women: A rejection demanded their respect, made them trust you more.
Jo Nesbø
With regard to power, women don’t have the vanity men have. They don’t need to make power visible, they only want the power to give them the other things they want. Security. Food. Enjoyment. Revenge. Peace. They are rational, power-seeking planners, who think beyond the battle, beyond the victory celebrations. And because they have an inborn capacity to see weakness in their victims, they know instinctively when and how to strike. And when to stop. You can’t learn that...
Jo Nesbø
Still there are people who grasp freedom at once, who don't doubt, don't hesitate—but accept themselves as the measure of themselves and of everything, and who don't seem to show any dread. In some cases there are people who have the strength to do it and the innate wisdom to understand what the price is. In other cases they are people who have no idea what they're doing, who choose freedom out of ignorance and lack of understanding—they know nothing about any price, and they go under when the price is demanded. It means ruin to choose to think for oneself if one can't think.
Jens Bjørneboe
What they display, these students who don't arrive in the reading room until nine, or even later, is a kind of daring. They play with life, with possibilities. For me my studies are like a tightrope I'm balancing on, life will begin only when I've reached the other side. Only when I'm standing there triumphantly, with a glowing testimonial and glittering results, only then, I think to myself, will I be free.
Hanne Ørstavik
To live is - to war with trolls In the holds of the heart and mind
Henrik Ibsen
People so easily forget their past selves.
Henrik Ibsen
Harry doesn't like people, you see." "I do like people," Harry said. "I just don't like being with them. Particularly when there's a lot of them at the same time.
Jo Nesbø
It's good for me to see so many other people who are not me. That there are so many others. I feel affection for them. Most of them are doing the best they can. I am also doing the best I can.
Erlend Loe
My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm's edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss.
Edvard Munch
What people are afraid of can tell us a lot about society.
Anne Holt
One of the things that kills Buddhist spiritual life is excessive seriousness.
Gil Fronsdal
There's no difference between pulp fiction and highbrow fiction, one is as good as the other, the only difference is the aura they have, and that's determined by the people who read the stuff, not by the book itself. There's no such thing as 'the book itself.
Karl Ove Knausgård
An acquaintanceship with the literature of the world may be won by any person who will devote half an hour a day to the careful reading of the best books. The habit of reading good books is one that gives great comfort in all the stages and among all the vicissitudes of life. The man who has learned to love good reading is never alone. His friends are the great ones of human history, and to them he may always go for stimulating and helpful communion. --GQ 71 (GQ is A Guide for Quorums of the Melchizedek Priesthood, 3rd Edition, 1930)
John A. Widtsoe
Sometimes I would hold it in for days so that I could have a really big one and also because it felt good in itself. When I really did have to shit, so much that I could barely stand upright but had to bend forward, I had such a fantastic feeling in my body if I didn't let nature take its course, if I squeezed the muscles in my butt together as hard as I could and, as it were, forced the shit back to where it came from. But this was a dangerous game, because if you did it too many times the turd ultimately grew so big it was impossible to shit it out. Oh Christ, how it hurt when such an enormous turd had to come out! It was truly unbearable, I was convulsed with pain, it was as if my body were exploding with pain, AAAAAAGGGHHH!! I screamed, OOOOOHHH, and then, just as it was at its very worst, suddenly it was out.Oh, how good that was!
Karl Ove Knausgård
A human being weighing 70 kilograms contains among other things:-45 litres of water-Enough chalk to whiten a chicken pen-Enough phosphorus for 2,200 matches-Enough fat to make approximately 70 bars of soap-Enough iron to make a two inch nail-Enough carbon for 9,000 pencil points-A spoonful of magnesiumI weigh more than 70 kilograms.And I remember a TV series called Cosmos. Carl Sagan would walk around on a set that was meant to look like space, speaking in large numbers. On one of the shows he sat in front of a tank full of all the substances human beings are made of. He stirred the tank with a stick wondering if he would be able to create life.He didn’t succeed.
Erlend Loe
The thing is, it's very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right
Atle Selberg
You are Bellman, aren’t you? The genius who sent the sauna ape after me?” Harry nodded toward the Finn.
Jo Nesbø
I've knitted myself a hat, it's plum red with an appealing lace pattern, I figured that a few air holes would be nice now that it's spring. I put it on and feel like a cranberry in the snow, and I wonder if they can see me from the moon. Me and the Great Wall.
Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold
Sometimes I would hold it in for days so that I could have a really big one and also because it felt good in itself. When I really did have to shit, so much that I could barely stand upright but had to bend forward, I had such a fantastic feeling in my body if I didn't let nature take its course, if I squeezed the muscles in my butt together as hard as I could and, as it were, forced the shit back to where it came from. But this was a dangerous game, because if you did it too many times the turd ultimately grew so big it was impossible to shit it out. Oh Christ, how it hurt when such an enormous turd had to come out! It was truly unbearable, I was convulsed with pain, it was as if my body were exploding with pain, AAAAAAGGGHHH!! I screamed, OOOOOHHH, and then, just as it was at its very worst, suddenly it was out.Oh, how good that was!
Karl Ove Knausgård
A human being weighing 70 kilograms contains among other things:-45 litres of water-Enough chalk to whiten a chicken pen-Enough phosphorus for 2,200 matches-Enough fat to make approximately 70 bars of soap-Enough iron to make a two inch nail-Enough carbon for 9,000 pencil points-A spoonful of magnesiumI weigh more than 70 kilograms.And I remember a TV series called Cosmos. Carl Sagan would walk around on a set that was meant to look like space, speaking in large numbers. On one of the shows he sat in front of a tank full of all the substances human beings are made of. He stirred the tank with a stick wondering if he would be able to create life.He didn’t succeed.
Erlend Loe
The thing is, it's very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right
Atle Selberg
You are Bellman, aren’t you? The genius who sent the sauna ape after me?” Harry nodded toward the Finn.
Jo Nesbø
I've knitted myself a hat, it's plum red with an appealing lace pattern, I figured that a few air holes would be nice now that it's spring. I put it on and feel like a cranberry in the snow, and I wonder if they can see me from the moon. Me and the Great Wall.
Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold
For Heidegger, boredom is a privileged fundamental mood because it leads us directly into the very problem complex of being and time.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
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.
Karl Ove Knausgård
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.
Karl Ove Knausgård
We shall never meet, but there is something I want you to know. My time is not the same as your time. Our times are not the same. And do you know what that means? That means that time does not exist. Do you want me to repeat that? There is no time. There is a life and a death. There are people and animals. Our thoughts exist. And the world. The universe, too. But there is no time. You might as well take it easy. Do you feel better now? I feel better. This is going to work out. Have a nice day.
Erlend Loe
A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.
Henrik Ibsen
But that's life. That's what you learn from when things happen. Especially at your age. You just have to take it in and remember to think afterwards and not forget and never grow bitter.
Per Petterson
When you can't turn back, just keep on going!
Atle Jarnæs Lerøy
All those wasted and squandered years when I did nothing but go around looking inside myself until I ended up alone even though I was surrounded by people. But I paid attention only to what was happenstance about them - not their true selves.
Sigrid Undset
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
What you want most you push away from you.You want more than you care to admit.
Tarjei Vesaas
They had studied law, information technology and art history as part of their beauty treatment, they had let Norwegian taxpayers finance years at university just so that they could end up as overqualified, stay-at-home playthings and sit here exchanging confidences about how to keep their sugar daddies suitably happy, suitably jealous and suitably on their toes.
Jo Nesbø
The rearing of children is considered too important to be left to the individual and should be the responsibility of the state.
Jostein Gaarder
A state that does not educate and train women is like a man who only trains his right arm.
Jostein Gaarder
If we talk about the living oracles and want to pay respect to them, how shall we do this? Shall we do it by never reading their words-by paying not attention to that which they say? That is a very poor way of doing.We ought to listen to their words. When we cannot hear their words, we should read them; for they are the words of the authorized servants of God. I feel that there is a great neglect among us in this respect. --CR, 1897, 38, George Q. Cannon (CR is Reports of the General Conferences of the Church)
John A. Widtsoe
Without denying that adaptation may be one of God's methods of operation, it may be definitely said, that an intelligent Master of the universe, in which we believe, has the power to prepare an earth to fit the needs of man; or fit man to meet the conditions of earth. If He were not able to do so, He would be inferior to His creatures who build houses for human comfort, and equip them with heating, freezing, and many other devices. The argument for adaptation, standing alone, requires chance as a creative force. That we do not and cannot believe.
John A. Widtsoe
No one attribute so clearly distinguishes man as does the intelligent will or the will to act intelligently. It was by the exercise of their wills that spiritual beings in the beginning gathered information rapidly or slowly, acquired experiences freely or laboriously. Through the exercise of their wills they grew, remained passive, or retrograded, for with living things motion in any direction is possible.
John A. Widtsoe
There is a purpose in life--to raise men nearer to the likeness of God. Whoever seeks that ideal, daily, finds joy; and in no other way can true joy be found.
John A. Widtsoe
True freedom, which is full joy, is the complete recognition of law and adaptation to it. Bondage comes from ignorance of law or opposition to it.
John A. Widtsoe
A life without an objective is much like a ship at sea with no port in mind. It drifts with the waves or storms, or with the whim of the captain. They are tempted to ask, amidst the battles of life, "Is the struggle worth-while?" That attitude lessens the joy of living. They who say that there is no purpose in life are not unhappy, but become dangerous to themselves and others, for they have no safe guide for their actions. Indeed, life has not objective save physical satisfactions, it is empty and valueless.
John A. Widtsoe
Men, discouraged by their failure to accomplish exactly what they desire, often speak of their lives as purposeless, but it is idle talk, for, in fact, no intelligent life which concerns itself vigorously and properly with the things about it can be said to be purposeless. Such a life adheres, automatically, to the law of progression, and therefore moves toward a great destiny of supreme power and accompanying joys. The only purposeless life is the one that does not use its faculties. It matters little what tasks men perform in life, if only they do them well and will all their strength. In the eternal plan they are given progressive value. In an infinite universe, one cannot possibly learn all or do all, at once. A beginning must be made somewhere and corner by corner, department by department, space by space, all will be known and conquered. In the end, all must be explored, and whether one begins in the east or the west cannot matter much. The big concern is the extent to which a man offers himself, mind and body, to his worthwhile work. Upon that will growth depend.
John A. Widtsoe
We are aware that the order of God requires the exercise of humility, but not of servility of slaves; but a humility that can be associated with undoubted courage and unflinching integrity; at the same time there is no room for pride, self-sufficient pride, that rests solely upon its own capabilities, and refuses to look for the support and countenance of others.--MS 7:91 [MS is the Millenial Star]
John A. Widtsoe
The line of communication between God and man is always open unless broken by man himself. We are, as it were, always in the presence of our Father in Heaven. Through His Holy Spirit, God is with us always and everywhere.
John A. Widtsoe
I am afraid, Torvald, I do not exactly know what religion is. ... When I am away from all this, and am alone, I will look into that matter too. I will see if what the clergyman said is true, or at all events if it is true for me.
Henrik Ibsen
You are not insane if you believe in things that don't exist. You are insane if you are the only one believing in it. This is the difference between religion and insanity.
Knut Nærum
Her heart felt as if it were breaking in her breast, bleeding and bleeding, young and fierce. From grief over the warm and ardent love which she had lost and still secretly mourned; from anguished joy over the pale, luminous love which drew her to the farthest boundaries of life on this earth. Through the great darkness that would come, she saw the gleam of another, gentler sun, and she sensed the fragrance of the herbs in the garden at world's end.
Sigrid Undset
But what really matters is not what you believe but the faith and conviction with which you believe…
Knut Hamsun
ONE WORDOne word— one stonein a cold river.One more stone—I'll need many stonesif I'm going to get over.
Olav H. Hauge
I can't even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace.
Knut Hamsun
The poet must always, in every instance, have the vibrant word... that by it's trenchancy can so wound my soul that it whimpers.... One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word; one must be able to give one's writing unexpected effects. It must have a hectic, anguished vehemence, so that it rushes past like a gust of air, and it must have a latent, roistering tenderness so that it creeps and steals one's mind; it must be able to ring out like a sea-shanty in a tremendous hour, in the time of the tempest, and it must be able to sigh like one who, in tearful mood, sobs in his inmost heart.
Knut Hamsun
A dead dog is more quiet than a house on the steppes, a chair in a empty room.
Per Petterson
There are only two things worse then an empty canvas: death and taxes.
Ragnar Tørnquist