1
" But if one gets to the point where the narrative of the one true love merges with the narrative of hedonistic, boundless sex, gradually other obstacles arise, for that kind of sex is contingent on distance, and if one is in a relationship, if one lives together every day, it is in the nature of the relationship that the distance gets smaller and smaller, one grows closer and closer together, that is what we call love, and the greater the love, the more difficult it becomes to reconcile it with sex, unless one is able to turn it into a game, and pretend that the person one is sleeping with doesn’t matter. Perhaps that is the supreme act of love, it strikes me now. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Winter (Seasons Quartet, #2)
5
" The same year that the third great Viking ship found in Norway was excavated, at Oseberg, the town of Ålesund burned. At that time the Viking ships were displayed in makeshift exhibition halls, and the great Ålesund fire hastened the process of building a separate museum for them. The architect Fritz Holland proposed building an enormous crypt for them beneath the royal palace in Oslo. It was to be 63 metres long and 15 metres wide, with a niche for each ship. The walls were to be covered with reliefs of Viking motifs. Drawings exist of this underground hall. It is full of arches and vaults, and everything is made of stone. The ships stand in a kind of depression in the floor. More than anything it resembles a burial chamber, and that is fitting, one might think, both because the three ships were originally graves and because placed in a subterranean crypt beneath the palace gardens they would appear as what they represented: an embodiment of a national myth, in reality relics of a bygone era, alive only in the symbolic realm. The crypt was never built, and the power of history over the construction of national identity has since faded away almost entirely. There is another unrealised drawing of Oslo, from the 1920s, with tall brick buildings like skyscrapers along the main thoroughfare, Karl Johans Gate, and Zeppelins sailing above the city. When I look at these drawings, of a reality that was never realised, and feel the enormous pull they exert, which I am unable to explain, I know that the people living in Kristiania in 1904, as Oslo was called then, would have stared open-mouthed at nearly everything that surrounds us today and which we hardly notice, unable to believe their eyes. What is a stone crypt compared to a telephone that shows living pictures? What is the writing down of Draumkvedet (The Dream Poem), a late-medieval Norwegian visionary ballad, compared to a robot lawnmower that cuts the grass automatically? "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Winter (Seasons Quartet, #2)
6
" O outono é uma passagem, um tempo de esvaziamento: da luz no céu, do calor no ar, das folhas nas árvores e plantas. O inverno que se segue é um estado, nele é a imobilidade que impera. A terra endurece, a água gela, a neve cobre o chão. Que este estado por vezes se represente como um rei, deve-se talvez à sensação de que a imobilidade é algo imposto, algo que vem de fora e que é imposto pela força à paisagem. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Winter (Seasons Quartet, #2)
7
" They themselves think that Christmas presents are only about this, but I know that the gifts have a longer journey to travel: like hope, they come sailing from the islands of the imaginary future and onto reality’s shores, where they gain weight and presence, but not for long, for they are travelling on, out on the other side, into the lost past, where their lives will "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Winter (Seasons Quartet, #2)
8
" They themselves think that Christmas presents are only about this, but I know that the gifts have a longer journey to travel: like hope, they come sailing from the islands of the imaginary future and onto reality’s shores, where they gain weight and presence, but not for long, for they are travelling on, out on the other side, into the lost past, where their lives will continue as incorporeal memories, which is perhaps the most important part of their existence, preserving the memory of the Christmases of childhood. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Winter (Seasons Quartet, #2)
10
" Every single moment of life stands open in several directions, it is as if it had three or seven doors, as in a fairy tail, into rooms that all contain different futures. These hypothetical offshoots of time cease to exist whenever we make a choice, and have never existed in themselves, a little like the unknown faces we see in dreams. While the past is lost forever, everything that didn't happen in it is doubly lost. This creates a particular kind of feeling of loss, the melancholy of an unrealised past. The feeling sounds overwrought and unnecessary, something to fill our idle and sheltered souls, but it is founded on a fundamentally human insight and longing: everything could have been different. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Winter (Seasons Quartet, #2)
12
" as if her soul were forced to fill a form which isn’t quite its own, not unlike a state that can be seen in certain horses, where the contrast between the powerful, magnificent body, capable of practically any feat of speed and wildness and daring, and the shy, extremely sensitive and tightly strung spirit, is so great that it seems unreasonable, and one longs on behalf of the animal for it to be spared all these saddles, halters, boxes and stables, all these elaborate exercises and performances, and just be allowed to gallop on a plain, free from everything, including itself. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Winter (Seasons Quartet, #2)
16
" 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. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Winter (Seasons Quartet, #2)
