2
" To turn 40 is to realize that one’s limitations will last one’s whole life through, but also to know that all the time, whether one likes it or not, and whether one is aware of it or not, new layers are being added to one’s character, a type of knowledge and insight that isn’t directed towards the future, towards what will come to pass or one day be accomplished, but towards the here and now, in the things you do every day, in what you think about them and what you understand of them. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Autumn (Seasons Quartet, #1)
6
" That’s the experience I’ve gained from working in the garden: there’s no reason to be cautious or anxious about anything, life is so robust, it seems to come cascading, blind and green, and at times it is frightening, because we too are alive, but we live in what amounts to a controlled environment, which makes us fear whatever is blind, wild, chaotic, stretching towards the sun, but most often also beautiful, in a deeper way than the purely visual, for the soil smells of rot and darkness, teems with scuttling beetles and convulsing worms, the flower stalks are juicy, their petals brim with scents, and the air, cold and sharp, warm and humid, filled with sunrays or rain, lies against skin, accustomed to the indoors, like a soothing compress of hereness. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Autumn (Seasons Quartet, #1)
9
" Even though we are not attached to the earth with roots, but are able to walk about on top of it, yet we are inseparably bound to it, both in that its transformative and, as it were, moves us about with its force, and in that, when life ebbs away and the earth's force no longer sustains us, it draws us down towards itself in a gruesome final embrace, before we not only become like it, but become it. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Autumn (Seasons Quartet, #1)
13
" It feels like I have started something new, something quite different, and that is this family. I think of it every day, that what matters is now, that the years we are living through now are when everything important happens. My previous life seems more and more distant. I am no longer preoccupied with my own childhood. Not interested in my student years, my twenties. All that seems far, far away. And I can imagine how it will be when what is happening now is over, when the children have moved out, the thought that these were the important years, this is when I was alive. Why didn’t I appreciate it while I had it? Because then, I sometimes think, I hadn’t had it yet. Only what slips through one’s fingers, only what is never expressed in words… exists completely. That is the price of proximity: you don’t see it. Don’t know that it’s there. Then it is over, then you see it. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Autumn (Seasons Quartet, #1)
15
" Transfixed, I saw a hull tower above me like a mountainside, and an anchor, thick as a tree trunk, vanishing mutely into the deep. Dreams belong to an ancient substratum within us and constitute a form of consciousness that we have in common with animals. When I woke up, it occurred to me that this must be how our world appears to them, that this is how animals perceive all our constructions, all our skyscrapers, bridges and vessels. For in my dream the oil tankers meant nothing, they were just there, while at the same time the impression they made filled me entirely. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Autumn (Seasons Quartet, #1)
16
" But if it were possible to see everyone who has retired to their beds in a great city at night, in London, New York or Tokyo, for example, if we imagined that the buildings were made of glass and that all the rooms were lit, the sight would be deeply unsettling. Everywhere there would be people lying motionless in their cocoons, in room after room for miles on end, and not just at street level, along roads and crossroads, but even up in the air, separated by plateaus, some of them twenty metres above ground, some fifty, some a hundred. We would be able to see millions of immobile people who have withdrawn from others in order to lie in a coma throughout the night. Sleep’s vertiginous link to primordial times, not just with human life as it first unfolded on the plains of Africa three hundred thousand years ago, but with life on earth in its very first form, rising out of the sea and coming ashore four hundred million years ago, would become apparent. And a bed would no longer be merely a piece of furniture acquired from a shop, but a boat that every human being has and which we board every evening to let ourselves be carried through the night. "
― Karl Ove Knausgård , Autumn (Seasons Quartet, #1)
