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"For the heart, life is simple:it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº38 Herman Brusselmans "To write these things you have to be free, and to be free you have to be inconsiderate to others."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº32 Julie Cafmeyer "Writing is more about destroying than creating."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº51 Peter van den Eede "The question of happiness is banal, but the question that follows is not, the question of meaning."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº31 Nicolas Rombouts "It is not the case that we are born equal and the conditions of life make our lives unequal.It is in the opposite, we are born unequal and the conditions of life make our live more equal."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº0 Anne Leysen "Those lives were spared my gaze. It searched upwards and outwards, and not to scrutinise what it found there, nor to be struck by the beauty, but to rest. To be utterly alone."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº1 Maarten Mertens 'A life is simple to understand, the elements that determine it are few. In mine there were two. My father and the fact that I had never belonged anywhere. It was no more difficult than that."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº26 Dieter Sermeus "'Would you like some coffee?' I asked. She shook her head and smiled. 'A cookie maybe?' I poured myself some coffee, took a couple of cookies, and went back to her."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº35 Simon Lenski "It really is all about fastening one’s gaze, he said. It really is all about fastening one’s gaze. It really is all about fastening one’s gaze."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº47 Cathy Berx “The spring I moved to Stockholm and met Linda (...) the world had suddenly opened, the intensity in it increased at breakneck speed. I was head over heels in love and everything was possible, my happiness was at bursting point all the time and embraced everything. If someone had spoken to me then about a lack of meaning I would have laughed out loud, for I was free and the world lay at my feet, open, packed with meaning, from the gleaming futuristic trains that streaked across Slussen beneath my flat, (...) the taste of ripe tomatoes to the sound of clacking heels on the cobbled slope down to the Hilton hotel late one night when we sat on a bench holding hands and knowing that it would be us two now and for ever. This state lasted for six months, for six months I was truly happy, truly at home in this world and in myself before slowly it began to lose its lustre, and once more the world moved out of my reach.”THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº15 Tim Taveirne "As a rule I was always aware of how I looked, of how others might think of what they saw. Sometimes I was elated and proud, at others downcast and full of selfhatred, but never indifferent, it had never happened that the eyes that saw me meant nothing at all, or that the surroundings I was in were as if expunged. But such was my state now, I was numb, and the numbness prevailed over everything else. The world lay like a shadow around me. Yngve returned with more bags. 'Shall I take over for a bit?' he said. 'No, I’m fine,' I said. 'But you could go and do some shopping. Whatever happens we need detergent, rubber gloves, and garbage bags. And at least something to eat.'"THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº21 Sylvia Van Peteghem "Perhaps it was the prefabricated nature of the days in this world I was reacting to, the rails of routine we followed, which made everything so predictable that we had to invest in entertainment to feel any hint of intensity."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº48 Yamina Takkatz "To begin with we are near the world, I believe, but if our trust is broken we seek refuge deep within ourselves, cut off from what goes on outside, and the remoteness thereby established is then so very, very difficult to surmount."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº17 Steve Aernouts "A lot had happened in her family, as in all families, but this was not something they talked about, so if it was manifest anywhere, it was in each of them, and the atmospheres they created collectively."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº30 Sieglinde Michiel "When it comes to memories of that iconic type, memories that are burned into you, I have maybe ten or so from my childhood. I'm a bad rememberer of situations. I forget almost everything as soon as it happens."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº23 Saskia De Coster THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº13 Ruth Joos "In the space of only a few minutes she could go from shouting her head off at me to declaring that she had never loved anyone the way she loved me, whereas I was completely the opposite, storing up and accumulating grievances and frustrations, which then lay like a sediment inside me, fossils of emotions, darkening my mind increasingly until eventually I became as hard as stone, unreceptive to reconciliation and tenderness."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº49 Roxette Chikua "Memory is not a reliable quantity in life. And it isn’t for the simple reason that memory doesn’t prioritise the truth. It is never the demand for truth that determines whether memory recalls an action accurately or not. It is self-interest which does. Memory is pragmatic, it is sly and artful, but not in any hostile or malicious way; on the contrary, it does everything it can to keep its host satisfied. Something pushes a memory into the great void of oblivion, something distorts it beyond recognition, something misunderstands it totally, something, and this something is as good as nothing, recalls it with sharpness, clarity and accuracy. That which is remembered accurately is never given to you to determine."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº22 Roderik Six "I lay on top of her again, we kissed, and while we kissed I pulled down her panties, not a lot, but enough to slip in a finger, it glided down through the hair, and the moment I felt her moistness against my fingertip, something in me seemed to crack. It was like a pain shooting through my abdomen, followed by a kind of spasm in my loins. The next second everything was alien to me. From one moment to the next, her naked breasts and her naked thighs lost all meaning."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº25 Peter Vantyghem “When I was in the café feeding Vanja there was always at least one other father there, usually of my age, that is, in his mid-thirties, almost all of whom had shaved heads to hide hair loss. (...) I found it hard to take the feminised aspect of their actions, even though I did exactly the same and was as feminised as they were. The slight disdain I felt for men pushing buggies was, to put it mildly, a two-edged sword as for the most part I had one in front of me when I saw them. I doubted I was alone in these feelings, I thought I could occasionally discern an uneasy look on some men’s faces in the play area, and the restlessness in the bodies, which were prone to snatching a couple of pull-ups on the bars while the children played around them.” THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº20 Peter Van den Eede "What I was trying to do was to reintroduce a closeness, trying to get the text to penetrate that whole series of conceptions and ideas and images that hang like a sky above reality, or cling to it like a membrane enclosing the eye, to reach into the reality of the human body and the frailty of the flesh"THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº3 Nico Boon "Oh, I was an idiot, what an idiot. The flame of stupidity burned bright inside me. Oh, such an idiot I was. What a stupid, idiotic bloody idiot. My shoes. My coat. Stupid, stupid, stupid. My mouth, shapeless, my thoughts, shapeless, my feelings, shapeless. Everything was spongy. There was nothing firm anywhere. Nothing solid, nothing vital. Soft, spongy and stupid. Oh fuck. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, how stupid I was."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº2 Mieke Versyp "Oooohhh. I said. Ooooohhh"THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº12 Max Neetens “They say one of the main things about religious ecstasy is a feeling of selflessness—that you yourself disappear. I feel that when I read Dostoyevsky. I can have that feeling. I can just disappear. I don’t know why, and I don’t know what it means. It’s the same thing looking at art. I feel so moved by it, but I don’t know why. Is it just emotions? And why should emotions be important, a little movement in your soul?”THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº10 Maarten Inghels "Why did I remember this so well? I usually forgot almost everything people, however close they were, said to me, and there was nothing in the situation that suggested this would be one of the last times we would meet. Perhaps I remembered it because he used my name; it must have been four years since I had heard him last use it, and for this reason his words were so unexpectedly intimate. (...) Or perhaps I remembered because I hated the hold he had over me, which was clear from how I became so happy about so little."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº40 Jan Vanriet "More often than not it was me who cooked when we had guests. Not so much because I liked doing it but because it gave me something to hide behind. I could stay in the kitchen when they arrived, poke my head in and say hello, carry on cooking in the kitchen, hidden, until the food was ready to serve and I had to appear. But even then I could hide behind something: a glass had to be filled with wine, another with water, I could take care of that and the instant the first course was finished I could clear the table and set it for the next."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº7 Hendrik Van Doorn “The immense intimacy you have with [children], the way in which your own temperament and mood are, so to speak, woven into theirs, such that your own worst sides are no longer something you can keep to yourself, hidden, but seem to take shape outside you, and are then hurled back.”THE KNAUSGÅRD/HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº 41 Heidi Lenaerts "When I was sixteen, I thought life was without end, the number of people in it inexhaustible. This was by no means strange, since right from starting school at the age of seven I’d been surrounded by hundreds of children and adults; people were a renewable resource, found in abundance, but what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day I would look back on my life, and this would be what I looked back on."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº44 Els De Bodt "On a balcony no bigger than a box or a cage a few metres up on the front of one of the apartment buildings behind the trees, a man and a woman stood looking out, each with a glass in their hand. From the gateway below, two men appeared lugging a table between them. A third man, who had been standing waiting on the pavement, flicked a cigarette onto the ground, climbed into the back of the van that was parked there, then emerged again with a grey blanket bundled in his arms. In the blue sky above them a plane angled steeply upwards, impossible to separate from the white trail it left behind. The world is old, yet simple, I thought to myself, and everything in it stands open."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº36 Delfine Bafort "Nothing else was good enough, nothing else did it. That was where I had to go, to the essence, to the inner core of human existence. If it took forty years, so be it, it took forty years. But I should never lose sight of it, never forget it, that was where I was going. There, there, there."THE KNAUSGÅRD / HASSELBLAD SERIES Nº39 Alexander Van Caeneghem