Top 80 Knut Hamsun Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The writer must be able to revel and roll in the abundance of words; he must know not only the direct but also the secret power of a word. There are overtones and undertones to a word, and lateral echoes, too.”

— Knut Hamsun

52. “Were I more conversant with literature and its great names, I could go on quoting them ad infinitum and acknowledge my debt for the merit you have been generous enough to find in my work.”

— Knut Hamsun

53. “Ovi listovi govore o mnogima, ali za mene samo o jednoj.”

— Knut Hamsun

54. “My head was emptying and emptying, and in the end it sat light and void on my shoulders. I percieved this gaping emptiness in my head with my whole body, I felt hollowed out from top to toe.”

— Knut Hamsun

55. “I was telling my wife a story about a rich man who was curious, too. He shot himself just to find out what comes after death. Ha, ha, ha! That’s the height of curiosity, isn’t it? Shooting yourself to find out what comes after death!”

— Knut Hamsun

56. “The sad rocking chair in the corner was actually a joke of a chair: if one started laughing at it, one could die laughing. It was too low for a grown man, and besides, it was so tight, one needed a shoehorn to get back out of it. In short, this room was simply not furnished in a way appropriate to intellectual effort, and I did not intend to keep it any longer.”

— Knut Hamsun

57. “Keep it, keep it!” I answered. “You are very welcome to it! It is only a couple of small things, doesn’t amount to anything – about everything I own in the world.”

— Knut Hamsun

58. “When good befalls a man he calls it Providence, when evil fate.”

— Knut Hamsun

59. “But there was she, and there were you. Her breath was on you, you tasted flesh. She came from some darkness – she was certainly not of this earth. Remember the eyes?”

— Knut Hamsun

60. “Wasn’t Pan sitting in a tree watching to see how I would comport myself? Wasn’t his belly open, and wasn’t he hunched over so that he seemed to be drinking from his own belly? But all this he did only so he could cock his eye and watch me, and the whole tree shook from his silent laughter when he saw that my thoughts were running away with me.”

— Knut Hamsun

61. “Small jerks began to appear in my legs, my walk became unsteady precisely because I wanted it to be smooth.”

— Knut Hamsun

62. “A country preacher could not have looked more full of milk and honey than this formidable writer, whose words had always left long bloody marks wherever they fell.”

— Knut Hamsun

63. “It’s always the same story. Naturally one doesn’t get the woman one should have had; but if by some damned freak of reason and justice it ever does happen, then of course she dies immediately after.”

— Knut Hamsun

64. “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!”

— Knut Hamsun

65. “It is years since I knew such peace, perhaps twenty or thirty years; or perhaps it was in a previous life. Whenever it was, I must surely have tasted before now this peace that I feel as I walk around in ecstasies, humming to myself, caring for every stone and every straw, and sensing that they care for me once more. We are friends.”

— Knut Hamsun

66. “Wild ideas popped up again in my head. What if I quietly went over and cut off the mooring ropes on one of the ships? What if I suddenly cried fire?”

— Knut Hamsun

67. “During those days, both the bed and my little rickety table were swimming in notes and scribbled-over manuscripts that I took turns working on, adding new ideas that occurred to me in the course of the day, crossing out material or freshening up the dead passages with a lively word here or there, and pushing on from sentence to sentence with great labor.”

— Knut Hamsun

68. “My whole consciousness underwent some change, a tissue in my brain parted.”

— Knut Hamsun

69. “My heart understands all, and it no longer beats, it peals.”

— Knut Hamsun

70. “God be praised, I had raised myself in my own estimation again!”

— Knut Hamsun

71. “A swarm of tiny noxious animals had bored a way into my inner man and hollowed me out.”

— Knut Hamsun

72. “Fall has arrived and has already begun to put everything into a deep sleep; flies and other insects have suffered their first setback, and up in the trees and down on the ground you can hear the sounds of struggling life, puttering, ceaselessly rustling, laboring not to perish.”

— Knut Hamsun

73. “Summer is the time for dreaming, and then you have to stop. But some people go on dreaming all their lives, and cannot change.”

— Knut Hamsun

74. “An intense, peculiar exhalation of light and colour emanates from these fantasies of mine. I start with surprise as I note one good thing after another, and tell myself that this is the best thing I have ever read. My head swims with a sense of satisfaction; delight inflates me; I grow grandiose.”

— Knut Hamsun

75. “Oh, a woman can’t tell one man from another; not always – not often.”

— Knut Hamsun

76. “Yes,” he answered, “it’s a strain being witty at my age. I’m giving it up.”

— Knut Hamsun

77. “Foul places began to gather in my inner being, black spores which spread more and more. And up in Heaven God Almighty sat and kept a watchful eye on me, and took heed that my destruction proceeded in accordance with all the rules of art, uniformly and gradually, without a break in the measure.”

— Knut Hamsun

78. “Deliberately shorn of all that makes for mere effect, Isak stands out as an elemental figure, the symbol of Man at his best, face to face with Nature and life. There is no greater human character – reverently said – in the Bible itself.”

— Knut Hamsun

79. “It is a splendid thing to exist sometimes.”

— Knut Hamsun

80. “I have no murders to tell about, but I have joys and sufferings and love. And love is every bit as violent and dangerous as murder.”

— Knut Hamsun

81. “Besides, beyond question, it takes a certain degree of brainlessness to remain permanently contented with oneself and with everything.”

— Knut Hamsun

82. “Mind you, they were not all that old, as people go. Suppose he was nineteen, that would make her a mere seventeen or so. Or if we were to tell the truth and say that he was only sixteen, that would make her still less – what age would that be? And there they stood.”

— Knut Hamsun

83. “Small things and great occur; a tooth falls from the mouth, a man out of the ranks, a sparrow to the ground.”

— Knut Hamsun

84. “Off Sundays the blacksmith put on his best clothes and went for a quiet walk about the town and its environs. He was not a churchgoer, but he was an honest and religious man, with a thousand sins of which he repented, and a thousand of God’s blessings which gladdened his heart.”

— Knut Hamsun