21
" She did occasionally criticise my priorities, how could I buy three new LPs one Friday afternoon when I was walking around in shoes with the sole flapping off? They’re just material goods, I responded, objects, while music was completely different. This was the mind, for Christ’s sake. This is what we need, really, and I do mean really, and it’s important to prioritise it. Everyone prioritises. Everyone wants new jackets and new shoes and new cars and new houses and new caravans and new mountain cabins and new boats. But I don’t. I buy books and records because they say something about what life is about, what it is to be a human here on earth. Do you understand?
‘Yes, you’re probably right, in a way. But isn’t it terribly impractical to walk around with your soles coming off? And it doesn’t look very nice, either, does it.’
‘What do you want me to do? I haven’t got any money. I prioritised music on this occasion. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Min kamp 4 (Min kamp #4)
27
" I hated all authority, was an opponent of the whole limited society I had grown up in, with its bourgeois values and materialistic view of humanity. I despised what I had learned at gymnas, even about literature; all I needed to know, all true knowledge, the only really essential knowledge, was to be found in the books I read and the music I listened to. I wasn’t interested in money or status symbols; I knew that the essential value in life lay elsewhere. I didn’t want to study, had no wish to receive an education at a conventional institution like a university, I wanted to travel down through Europe, sleep on beaches, in cheap hotels, or with friends I made on the way. Take odd jobs to survive, wash dishes at hotels, load or unload boats, pick oranges … "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Min kamp 4 (Min kamp #4)
29
" El silencio allí en lo alto, rebosante de belleza, me hizo verme a mí mismo, o ser consciente de mí mismo, no en relación con mi psicología o moral, no tenía nada que ver con mis cualidades, sino sólo con que yo existía allí, este cuerpo que se movía hacia arriba, yo estaba allí y en ese momento, y luego moriría. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Min kamp 4 (Min kamp #4)
37
" [I]n music there is no meaning, there is no explanation, there are no people, only voices, each with its own special distinctive quality, as though this is its essential quality, its essence, unadulterated, no body, no personality, yes, a kind of personality without a person, and on every record, there is an infinity of such characteristics, from another world, which you meet whenever you play the music. I never worked out what it was that possessed me when music possessed me, other than that I always wanted it. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Min kamp 4 (Min kamp #4)
38
" I continued along the road past the fish-processing plant, which was deserted apart from the seagulls huddled on the roof, and on towards the bend which led to the higher part of the village. Beyond the last house the mountain soared straight up. There was no intermediate stage, which I was used to where I had grown up, those diffuse, hard-to-define places which were neither private property nor open nature. This was real nature, and not the low, gentle Sørland type of nature but wild, harsh, windswept Arctic nature, which confronted you as soon as you opened the door. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Min kamp 4 (Min kamp #4)
