240 Quotes by Knut Hamsun

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

Rather than admire the mediocre great men over whom passersby nudge each other in awe, I venerate the young, unknown geniuses who die in their teens, their souls shattered – delicate, phosphorescent glowworms that one must see to know they really did exist.

No matter how much I kept telling myself that I was behaving like an idiot, it was no use.

It is the reign of Autumn, the height of the Carnival of Decay, the roses have got inflammation in their blushes, an uncanny hectic tinge, through their soft damask. I felt myself like a creeping thing on the verge of destruction, gripped by ruin in the midst of a whole world ready for lethargic sleep.

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.

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.