"I kneel and hold out my hands / even though I hear there No. / Take these flowers with Thanks for them / you decorated my road with. ("With Red Roses")»

"FIRST SERVANT: Where did you come from? SOLDIER: I came in this way because I don't know which way to go in. FIRST SERVANT: But where are you going? SOLDIER: To Prince Giorgi. I come from the camp."

"Written by me. Written today to ease my heart. I have lost my post in the café and my happy days. I have lost everything. And the café was Café Maximilian. A young gentleman in grey clothes came evening after evening with two friends and sat down at one of my tables. So many gentlemen came, they all had a kind word for me, – this one nothing. He was tall and slender, had soft, black hair and blue eyes with which he sometimes looked at me. On his upper lip a small moustache had begun to grow. ("The Slaves of Love")"

"We will be in St. Petersburg only in September. I am going on a state scholarship to travel to the Caucasus, to the Orient, Persia, Turkey. We have come from Finland, where we have lived for a year. On nineteen marshy islands, Peter the Great built a city exactly two hundred years ago. The Neva pierces the city everywhere, it is wonderfully torn up, piecemeal, and it is wonderfully mixed: magnificent Western European barracks teem with Byzantine domed buildings and delightful mud houses."

"ANIMALS: No, you see – as I said – that's what one does, / one behaves as one should. / That teaching should not be despised by any small people, / even if one, like you, is a member of the awakened."

"The miller's son walked and thought. He was a big boy of fourteen, brown from the sun and wind and full of many ideas. When he grew up he wanted to be a matchmaker. It was so deliciously dangerous, he could get sulfur on his fingers so no one dared greet him. He would be greatly respected among his comrades for his uncanny craftsmanship."

"KARENO (sitting at the desk. He is 50 years old, beardless, with almost white hair, wearing worn, gray clothes): The future of my philosophy, you say? It depends on whether it has any future. THE FARMER (56 years old, fat, with a pinched nose, a little shabbily dressed, in a chair): You have already got your party, though. KARENO: I am the chairman of an association, that's all. People still believe today that philosophy is thinking; I have thought that philosophy was life theoretically expressed through thinking."

"You travel around a bit, you wander from place to place and you have the fate of bumping into people you have seen before, meeting them suddenly, in unexpected places, so that out of surprise you quite forget to take off your hat and greet them. This happens to me often, yes very often. There is nothing you can do about it. ("The Queen of Sheba")"

"KARENO (heard on the right): This is where I thought (comes up the walkway and climbs up the slate rock. He is 39 years old and has completely gray hair). Here is a place, I thought. MR. OTERMAN (comes up behind, plump, 60 years old, jovial): Here yes (also climbs up the rock and looks around). Yeah. Yes, as I said, build your little house here. I will give you all the land you want."

"THE LADY: So, Ingeborg, now there are only a few handkerchiefs and other small things left and I can do that alone. Now you go on that errand. Throw on a scarf. INGEBORG: Yes, (willing to go). THE LADY: Yes, but take the basket with you. INGEBORG: Oh yes, that's true (takes the largest basket full of linen and walks past the veranda to the back steps of the house)."

"In recent days I have thought and thought about the eternal day of the Nordland summer. I sit here and think about it and about a cabin that I lived in and about the forest behind the cabin and I start writing something down to shorten the time and for my own pleasure."

"A fine, golden metal rim rises in the east where the sun rises. The city is beginning to wake up, there is already the occasional distant rumble of carts entering the streets from the countryside, large, heavy farmer's carts, full of peat goods, hay and offal and firewood."

"So many, so many things that can happen in the world..." Editor Lynge (1893) deals with the political situation in Norway from the time the Liberal Party split in 1888 until the spring of 1893.

"Last year, in the middle of summer, a small Norwegian coastal town became the scene of some very unusual events. A stranger appeared in town, a certain Nagel, a strange and peculiar charlatan who did a lot of remarkable things and who disappeared again as suddenly as he had arrived."

"The awareness that I was honest rose to my head, filling me with a wonderful feeling of being a character, a white lighthouse in the middle of a murky human sea where wreckage floated about."

"Mr. Oftedal holds a position that many a minister could envy. In ten years he has driven it to become one of Norway's notables, - and that in ten eventful years, in which greater figures than his have fallen without being remembered any more, and greater abilities and powers than his have fought without winning."

"The first thing that strikes a travel-weary stranger and makes him dizzy in America is, of course, the great noise, the restlessness, the bustling life in the streets, the restless, daring haste with which everything is carried on. If he lands in New York in the summer, he will also be a little surprised to see gentlemen without coats, without waistcoats, with only their suspenders over their shirts, taking a stroll through the streets with their silk-clad lady under their arm. It immediately makes a strange impression, a free impression; there is speed in the black etiquette."

"Facing south, on the right was a long, steep, mighty hill. Behind this were blue mountains. On the left a bare cliff; many waterfalls descending. The forest was in full leaf; it sent a good smell with the wind to all sides, and reminded one of life in a leafy hall."

"A hut - it stood, as if in thought - / was walled to the wall of the mountain side; / it stood there, where the predator wanders / took a blow from an ancient hedge. / When the storm picked up speed up to the rift, / the owner of the stone hut was not happy; / then he took the holy scriptures - / and then knelt down and worshipped.

"Near a small forest-fringed hill, at the foot of which a small stream wound through the beautiful meadow, lay a magnificent farmhouse. It belonged to the village's richest man, Ole Aae."