"In the winter of 18** I traveled to Lofoten with one of Rønneberg's fishing yachts from Ålesund. We made the trip in just under four weeks, I disembarked in Skroven and began to wait for a boat apartment to move on. At Easter a homecoming boat was going over to Saltenlandet and although I didn't want to get to the destination with this boat team, I still went with it."

"There is a forest between the sea and Benoni's house. It is not Benoni's forest, but a common, a large mixed forest of conifers, birch and aspen. At a certain time in the summer, people from two parishes come together here and ravage and chop to their hearts' content; when they are finished and have brought the wood home, the forest lies quiet again for the rest of the year and the animals and birds have perfect peace again."

"The sea was mirror-clear yesterday and it is mirror-clear today. It is Indian summer and warm on the island – and oh how gentle and warm it is! – But there is no sun. Many years have passed since I was in such peace, perhaps twenty or thirty years, perhaps in a previous life. But once before, I think, I must have tasted this peace since I walk here humming and being delighted and caring for every stone and every blade of grass and they seem to care for me in return. We are familiar."

"In the outlying areas there are many islands and there is a small one called Blåmandsø, it has barely a hundred people. But the neighboring island is much larger, there are probably three or four hundred people, and there is a church and authorities. It is called Kirkeøen. Since my childhood, there has also been a post office and telegraph on Kirkeøen. ("On Blåmandsø")"

"The housemaid in the rectory, Marie van Loos, stands in the kitchen window and looks far up the road. She knows the two up there by the gate, it is clearly the telegraphist Rolandsen, her own fiancé, and the bell-ringer's daughter Olga. Now it was the second time she had seen these two together this spring; what could that mean? If Miss van Loos had not had so much to do just now, she would have gone straight up the road to them and demanded an explanation."

"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."