Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes

It is the same for all men. None of us can escape this shadow of the father, even if that shadow fills us with fear, even if it has no name or face. To be worthy of that man, to prove something to that man, to exorcise the memory of that man from every corner of our life--however it affects us, the shadow of that man cannot be denied.

Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.

The emptiness where I used pain to fill the hole no longer controls me, no longer calls me because of you.

My dad was a preacher. My relationship, for example, with my father -- very difficult, and very painful, and it took me 50 years to wipe the face of my father off the face of God.

I think there is a time in every person's life where they have to let their parents go and figure out what being a parent means for themselves.

You cannot embrace your destiny if you do not let go of your history.

I don't want my past to become anyone else's future.

Now I'm free of him and I'm light as a feather. There's no weight holding me down; I'm ready to spread my wings and fly.

It’s about getting to a point in your life where you’re ready to let go and move on and become the better version of yourself.

In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers

Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She'd held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she'd been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.

She ran out of her marriage the way a woman can run out of a pair of sandals when she decides to let go and really dash.

Once you decide not to worry about that stuff anymore, dating and relationships and love and all that, it's like you're free to get on with real life.

How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.

I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.

When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.

My soul is not a palace of the past.

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

In the process of letting go you will lose many things from the past, but you will find yourself.

Everything that I bear within me bound, is to be found somewhere else free.

This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values.

In the process of letting go you will lose many things from the past, but you will find yourself. It will be a permanent Self, rooted in awareness and creativity. Once you have captured this, you have captured the world.

It is in that moment, when you really lay down your cards and see the relationship for what it was, that you'll find the freedom to kick it in the ass and let it go.

As we try to change, we will discover within us a fierce struggle between our loyalty to that battle-scarred victim of his own childhood, our father, and the father we want to be. We must meet our childhood father at close range: get to know him, learn to forgive him, and somehow, go beyond him.

The free expression of resentment against one's parents represents a great opportunity. It provides access to one's true self, reactivates numbed feelings, opens the way for mourning and - with luck - reconciliation.