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The long, long road over the moors and up into the forest - who trod it into being first of all? Man, a human being, the first that came here. There was no path before he came.

Knut Hamsun

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Knut Hamsun
Age: 92 †
Born: 1859
Born: August 4
Died: 1952
Died: February 19
Author
Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Writer
Knut Pedersen Hamsun
Hamsun
First
Forest
Long
Forests
Men
Road
Path
Came
Firsts
Human
Trod
Humans
Moors

More quotes by Knut Hamsun

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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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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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A word can be transformed into a coulour, light, a smell it is the writer's task to use it in such a way that it serves, never fails, can never be ignored.
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Truth is neither ojectivity nor the balanced view truth is a selfless subjectivity.
Knut Hamsun
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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 have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
Knut Hamsun
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But things worked out. Everything works out. Though sometimes they work out sideways.
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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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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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One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word.
Knut Hamsun
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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
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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.
Knut Hamsun
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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
Knut Hamsun
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But now it was spring again, and spring was almost unbearable for sensitive hearts. It drove creation to its utmost limits, it wafted its spice-laden breath even into the nostrils of the innocent.
Knut Hamsun
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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
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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.
Knut Hamsun
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I stood in the lee of an overhanging rock and thought of many things.
Knut Hamsun
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I have gone to the forest.
Knut Hamsun
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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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The whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow.
Knut Hamsun