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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.

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
Voice
Everlasting
Song
Distant
Spirit
Height
Everything
Spread
Great
Silent
Shroud
Never
Air
Shrouds
Darkness
Humming
Upon
Heights

More quotes by Knut Hamsun

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One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word.
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And love was creation's source,creation's ruler but all love's ways are strewn with blossoms and blood, blossoms and blood.
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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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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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I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
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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.
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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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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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But what really matters is not what you believe but the faith and conviction with which you believe.
Knut Hamsun
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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 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 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.
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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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The whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow.
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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But things worked out. Everything works out. Though sometimes they work out sideways.
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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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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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Truth is neither ojectivity nor the balanced view truth is a selfless subjectivity.
Knut Hamsun