Knut Hamsun Quotes

I'm so hyper-aware of everything around me and everyone and everything that people do.

When you grow up in poverty and learn how to survive it, it's something that stays with you forever.

Growing up, I had a face that people wanted to tell things to, and I grew up with adults who had so much to say. They had lived through decades of unbelievable poverty, starvation, political upheaval, chaos.

All sorrows are bearable, if there is bread.

No matter where you go, poor people have the capacity to endure. Some people even compliment us on it, as if endurance is all we can achieve.

I hope that people take away hope, maybe not in an obvious sense, but in the form of hearing somebody who's genuinely fighting to stay above water. And in that fight, there's hope. In that fight, maybe there's positivity.

Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.

War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.

Don't seem to he on the lookout for crows, else you'll set other people watching.

There was a time when I had the blues - I mean I really had it bad. I couldn't pay my light bill and I couldn't pay my rent and I really had the blues. But today I can pay my rent and I can pay the light bill and I still got the blues. So I must been born with 'em... That's my religion - the blues is my religion.

Nobody is stronger, nobody is weaker than someone who came back. There is nothing you can do to such a person because whatever you could do is less than what has already been done to him. We have already paid the price.

Suffering, if you're a Christian, suffering is a part of life. And it's not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life... There are all different ways to suffer. One way to suffer is through lack of food and shelter and there's another way to suffer which is lack of dignity and hope and there's all sorts of ways that people suffer and it's not just tangible, it's also intangible and we have to consider both.

My father left me with a saying that I've carried my entire life and tried to pass on to our kids: 'Tough times don't last, tough people do,'

It's impossible to protect your kids against disappointment in life.

My father had a couple of kids at the beginning of the Depression. There was not much employment. Not much welfare. People barely got by. People were tougher then.

For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.

Hardships and handicaps can...stimulate our energy to survive them. You'll find if you study the lives of people who've accomplished things, it's often been done with the help of great willpower in overcoming this and that.

Sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them.

My father always used to say, "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger," - 'til the accident.

We have said we will never collapse, never ever. We may have our droughts, our poverty, but as a people we shall never collapse, never ever.

When it comes to mentors, you can't beat survival.

Poverty breeds a lot of things. When people are desperate and trying to survive, they do drastic things.

As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.

She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.