One joy of life in the north comes after a winter storm, when the sky, freed of its burden, has paled, and the glow of the unseen sun is everywhere r… - Karl Ove Knausgård

That is what life is like, is it not? When we’re young we think there’s more to come, that this is only the beginning, whereas in fact it’s all there is, and what we have now, and barely even think about, will soon be the only thing we ever had.

The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing.

At the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. When you were forty you realized it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless you did something. Unless you took one last gamble.