Knut Hamsun

“For I mean to roam and think and make great irons red-hot.”

“An increasing number of people who lead mental lives of great intensity, people who are sensitive by nature, notice the steadily more frequent appearance in them of mental states of great strangeness ... a wordless and irrational feeling of ecstasy; or a breath of psychic pain; a sense of being spoken to from afar, from the sky or the sea; an agonizingly developed sense of hearing which can cause one to wince at the murmuring of unseen atoms; an irrational staring into the heart of some closed kingdom suddenly and briefly revealed.”

“Heaven knows that there are plenty of opportunities in later life, too, for being carried away. What of it? We remain what we are and, no doubt, it is all very good for us!”

“No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.”

“He was quite a Casanova, no doubt about it. He was in a very good mood today and stopped longer than usual. The girls could see he was gloriously drunk. ’Well, Ragna, why do you think I come here so often?’ asked Rolandsen. ’I’ve no idea,’ Ragna answered. ’You must think I’m sent by old Laban.’The girls giggled. ’When he says Laban he really means Adam.’’I’ve come to save you,’ said Rolandsen. ’You have to beware of the fishermen around here, they’re out-and-out seducers!’’There’s no greater seducer than you,’ said another girl. ’You’ve got two kids already. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’ ’How can you talk like that, Nicoline? You’ve always been a thorn in my flesh and you’ll be the death of me, you know damned well. But as for you, Ragna, I’m going to save your soul wether you like it or not!”

“Well, God be with you,’ she said as she finally left him. ’I’m sure He is,’ he replied. She gave a start. ’Are you certain of that?’’He has every reason to be. Obviously He’s Lord over all Creation, but it can’t be anything special to be god of animals and mountains. It’s really us human beings that make Him what He is. So why shouldn’t He be with us?’Having delivered this impressive speech, Rolandsen looked rather pleased with himself. The curate’s wife would be puzzling over him as she walked home. Ha-ha, it was not so surprising that the little dome resting on his shoulders should have made such a great invention after all! But now the cognac had arrived.”

“I have gone to the forest.”

“Do not forget, some give little, and it is much for them, others give all, and it costs them no effort; who then has given most?”

“I can't even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace.”

“But now it was spring again, and spring was almost unbearable for sensitive hearts. It drove creation to its utmost limits, it wafted its spice-laden breath even into the nostrils of the innocent.”

“Young hearts have their unfathomable depths.”

“Today riches and honours have been lavished on me, but one gift has been lacking, the most important one of all, the only one that matters, the gift of youth.”

“And here we go creating great men out of artisans who happened to have stumbled on a way to improve electrical apparatus or pedal through Sweden on a bicycle! And we solicit great men to write books promoting the cult of other great men! It's really very funny, and worth the price of admission! It will all end up with every village having his own great man - a lawyer, a novelist, and a polar explorer of immense stature! And the world will become wonderfully flat and simple and easy to master . . .”

“In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.”

“No, I don't admire the genius. But I admire and love the result of the genius's activity in the world, of which the great man is only the poor necessary tool, only, so to speak, the paltry awl to bore with.”

“In my solitude, many miles from men and houses, I am in a childishly happy and carefree state of mind, which you are incapable of understanding unless someone explains it to you.”

“I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.”

“It is as well perhaps that this is not the first time I have been swept off my feet. In the days of my blessed youth there were such occasions; in what young person's life do they not occur?”

“That room was Rolandsen’s world. Rolandsen was not just irresponsibility and inebriation, he was also great thinker and inventor. There was a smell of acids that permeated the corridor and came to the notice of every visitor. Rolandsen made no secret of the fact that he had all these medicaments there solely to disguise the aroma of all the brandy he consumed. But this was part of an act designed purely to give himself an air of inscrutability.”

“I opened my eyes; how could I keep them shut when I could not sleep? The same darkness brooded over me; the same unfathomable black eternity which my thoughts strove against and could not understand. I made the most despairing efforts to find a word black enough to characterize this darkness; a word so horribly black that it would darken my lips if I named it. Lord! how dark it was! and I am carried back in thought to the sea and the dark monsters that lay in wait for me. They would draw me to them, and clutch me tightly and bear me away by land and sea, through dark realms that no soul has seen. I feel myself on board, drawn through waters, hovering in clouds, sinking--sinking.”