My Struggle

The new items she had bought were added to the rest and belonged to her, unlike Dad’s possessions, which were expendable. The priest who buried him mentioned this in his sermon, he said that you have to ground your gaze, ground yourself in the world, by which he meant that my father had not done this, and he was absolutely right. But it was several

One child was absolutely out of the question for me, two were too few and too close together, but three, I reckoned, were perfect. Then the children outnumbered the parents, there were lots of permutations possible, then we were a gang. I had nothing but contempt for precise plans to pinpoint the most suitable time, both as far as our own lives wer

Maybe she didn’t seem that elated. More like mildly contemplative. Filled with a great inner peace after a long and happy life? In which the perfect contrast between the coffee cup’s cold, hard, white stoneware and the coffee’s hot, black liquid was only a temporary stopping point on a journey through the world’s noumena and phenomena? For had she

At the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. When you were forty you realized it was all here, banal everyday li

If I have learned one thing over these years that seems to me immensely important, particularly in an era such as ours, overflowing with such mediocrity, it is the following: Don’t believe you are anybody. Do not fucking believe you are somebody. Because you are not. You’re just a smug, mediocre little shit. Do not believe that you’re anything spec

I walked beside her, burning with shame because people were looking at us, burning with guilt because I had been drinking and burning with terror because, in her unbridled rage, she went straight for me and the person I was.

“I really mean it. What did you feel when you saw her?” “Less than I thought I would.” “Why’s that?” “Why? What sort of stupid question is that? How can I know? I feel what I feel. It’s not possible to identify every tiny fluctuation of the soul, if that’s what you believe.” “Isn’t that what you make your living from?” “No. I make my living from al

Unlike most other great writers, Dostoyevsky himself is not discernible in his novels. There are no brilliant turns of phrase that can point to him, there is no definitive moral that can be elicited, he uses all his ingenuity and diligence to individualize people, and since there is so much in man that will not allow itself to be humbled or effaced

But even though I didn’t understand a word of what Kjartan said, and nothing of what he wrote, nor anything of the poems he praised with such passion, I did understand intuitively that he was right, that there was such a thing as a supreme philosophy and a supreme poetry, and that even if you didn’t understand it, were unable to partake in it, you