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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.

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
Soul
Unknown
Venerate
Must
Admire
Nudge
Great
Souls
Geniuses
Really
Exist
Shattered
Men
Genius
Teens
Dies
Awe
Rather
Mediocre
Young
Delicate

More quotes by 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
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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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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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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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But what really matters is not what you believe but the faith and conviction with which you believe.
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.
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I have gone to the forest.
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.
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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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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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But things worked out. Everything works out. Though sometimes they work out sideways.
Knut Hamsun
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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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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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I stood in the lee of an overhanging rock and thought of many things.
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.
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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The whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow.
Knut Hamsun
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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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Truth is neither ojectivity nor the balanced view truth is a selfless subjectivity.
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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.
Knut Hamsun