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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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Knut Hamsun
Age: 92 †
Born: 1859
Born: August 4
Died: 1952
Died: February 19
Author
Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Writer
Knut Pedersen Hamsun
Hamsun
Direct
Secret
Word
Power
Must
Recognize
Merely

More quotes by Knut Hamsun

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I stood in the lee of an overhanging rock and thought of many things.
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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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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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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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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 had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
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
Knut Hamsun
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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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I have gone to the forest.
Knut Hamsun
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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
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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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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 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.
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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But things worked out. Everything works out. Though sometimes they work out sideways.
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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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
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The whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow.
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