Date: December 30, 2015

"A landscape [of the brain] opened up before me. I felt as if I were standing on the top of a mountain, gazing out over a plain, covered by long, meandering rivers. On the horizon, more mountains rose up, between them there were valleys and one of the valleys was covered by an enormous white glac...

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: December 30, 2015

"It was as if I were looking into an enormous grotto, at the bottom of which lay a pool filled with red liquid. Sometimes water came splashing in from the right, as if from a huge hose. I had never seen anything like it, for the walls of this grotto were so obviously alive, made of living tissue."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: December 30, 2015

"I had looked into a room, unlike any other, and when I lifted my gaze, that room was inside Hasanaj’s brain, who lay staring straight ahead under the drape in the larger room, filled with doctors and nurses and machines and equipment, and beyond that room there was an even larger room, warm and ...

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: December 30, 2015

"All those rooms were gathered in my own brain, which looked exactly like Hasanaj’s, a wet, gleaming, walnutlike lump, composed of 100 billion brain cells so tiny and so myriad they could only be compared to the stars of a galaxy."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: December 30, 2015

"The sight of the mountains behind the city, so green and haughty, lifted my spirits, and the sight of the brain, its physiological aspect -- the ragged edges of skull within which it had pulsated, the streaming red blood -- was also pleasant to think about, for the bright colors within connected...

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: December 30, 2015

"Marsh explained the architecture of the brain to me, and the way it functioned."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: December 30, 2015

"He explained how they reached tumors that were lodged deep in the brain, which is, very loosely speaking, crumpled up like a sheet of paper, and therefore full of folds and ravines that you can push aside and move through."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: December 30, 2015

"'Oh, man,' Pellegrin said. 'It was like her mind occupied the room'."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: December 30, 2015

"I had always considered my thoughts as something abstract, but they weren't; they were as material as the heart beating in my chest. The same was true of the mind, the soul, the personality; all of it was fixed in the cells and originated as a result of the various ways in which these cells reac...

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: December 30, 2015

"That is the wolf. The awkward, twisted or stupid part of the soul, the grudges and the envy, the hopelessness and the darkness, the childish joy and the unmanageable desire."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)