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A few days back someone sent me two feathers. Two bird's feathers in a sheet of note-paper with a coronet, and fastened with a seal. Sent from a place a long way off from one who need not have sent them back at all. That amused me too, those devilish green feathers.

Knut Hamsun

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Knut Hamsun
Age: 92 †
Born: 1859
Born: August 4
Died: 1952
Died: February 19
Author
Critic
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Playwright
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Writer
Knut Pedersen Hamsun
Hamsun
Place
Sheets
Two
Note
Fastened
Someone
Sent
Devilish
Back
Notes
Seal
Need
Bird
Sheet
Needs
Green
Seals
Long
Paper
Amused
Way
Days
Feathers

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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
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In my solitude, many miles from men and houses, I am in a childishly happy and carefree state of mind, which you are incapable of understanding unless someone explains it to you
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But things worked out. Everything works out. Though sometimes they work out sideways.
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Do you know what constitutes a great poet? He is a person without shame, incapable of blushing. Ordinary fools have moments when they go off by themselves and blush with shame not so the great poet.... If you really have to quote someone, quote a geographer that way you won't give yourself away. (p 44)
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The heavy red roses smoldering in the foggy morning, blood-colored and uninhibited, made me greedy, and tempted me powerfully to steal one--I asked the prices merely so I could come as near them as possible.
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There was a rock in front of my hut, a tall, gray rock. By its looks it seemed to be well-disposed toward me.
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In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.
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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.
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Do not forget, some give little, and it is much for them, others give all, and it costs them no effort who then has given most?
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Truth is neither ojectivity nor the balanced view truth is a selfless subjectivity.
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But what really matters is not what you believe but the faith and conviction with which you believe.
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The whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow.
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And the great spirit of darkness spread a shroud over me...everything was silent-everything. But upon the heights soughed the everlasting song, the voice of the air, the distant, toneless humming which is never silent.
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I stood in the lee of an overhanging rock and thought of many things.
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I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
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One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word.
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Language must resound with all the harmonies of music. The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing and is able to draw a sob from my soul by its very rightness.
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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