Quotes from Sult

“It was during the time I wandered about and starved in Christiania: Christiania, this singular city, from which no man departs without carrying away the traces of his sojourn there.”

The opening sentence sets a wry, self-aware narrator and a striking image of the city leaving marks on those who pass through it.

“The only thing I had to divert myself with was a little red rocking-chair, in which I used to sit in the evenings and doze and muse on all manner of things.”

A plain, deadpan description of poverty that quietly shows the narrator's wandering, idle mind.

“He looks like a great sprawling reptile striving with might and main to win a place in the world and reserve the footpath for himself.”

A vivid, unexpected simile that turns a passing stranger into a comic image, typical of the narrator's sharp eye.

“Every growing thing has received its peculiar impress: the delicately blown breath of the first cold. The stubbles straggle wanly sunwards, and the falling leaves rustle to the earth, with a sound as of errant silkworms.”

Lyrical nature description with fresh, precise imagery, showing the author's sensitivity to small sensory details.

“Thoughts come so swiftly to me and continue to flow so richly that I miss a number of telling bits, that I cannot set down quickly enough, although I work with all my might.”

A candid account of creative rush that reveals the narrator's restless, feverish inner life.

“All my dejection had vanished; all despair and pain had ceased, and I had at this moment, at least as far as my thought reached, not a wish unfilled. I sat up on the floor, folded my hands, and waited patiently for the dawn.”

A calm, strange turn in tone that shows how the narrator's moods swing abruptly and unpredictably.

“I entered the first café I came to going along, and asked for some boiled milk. I got the milk, drank it down, hot as it was, swallowed it greedily, every drop, paid for it, and went out again. I took the road home.”

Short, rhythmic sentences that render hunger and desperation through plain physical action.

“My head was clear and buoyant; it was as if it were a head of mere light that rested and gleamed on my shoulders. I felt inclined to play the wildest pranks, to do something astounding, to set the whole town in a ferment.”

An exuberant, slightly manic image of elation that captures the narrator's volatile mood swings.

“You Heaven God and Apis! with death staring me in the face--I tell you, I would rather be a bondsman in hell than a freedman in your mansions!”

An outburst of defiant, theatrical rhetoric that shows the narrator's raw pride and rage against God.

“Her body was to be deformed and repulsive, tall, very lean, and rather dark; and when she walked, her long limbs should gleam through her draperies at every stride she took.”

A feverish, imagined description from his drama that shows his mind turning obsessively on bodies and desire.

“I heard quite well what I was saying, and I swore this lie wittingly; repeating time after time, just to have the vicious satisfaction of perjuring myself.”

Self-aware, uncomfortable candour about his own dishonesty, a hallmark of the narrator's psychological honesty.