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

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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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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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I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
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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.
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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.
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I have gone to the forest.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
Knut Hamsun
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The whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow.
Knut Hamsun
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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)
Knut Hamsun
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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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Truth is neither ojectivity nor the balanced view truth is a selfless subjectivity.
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One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word.
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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?
Knut Hamsun