Sigrid Undset Quotes
All fires burn out at last.
I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom.
No one and nothing can harm us, child, except what we fear and love.
I write more readily than speak and I am especially reluctant to talk about myself.
Many a man is given what is intended for another, but no man is given another's fate.
All my days I have longed equally to travel the right road and to take my own errant path.
All that had happened and would happen was meant to be. Everything happens as it is meant to be.
"God will find you,” said the priest quietly. “Stay calm and do not flee from Him who has been seeking you before you even existed in your mother’s womb."
It’s a good thing when you don’t dare do something if you don’t think it’s right. But it’s not good when you think something’s not right because you don’t dare do it.
I went to work in an office and learned, among other lessons, to do things I did not care for, and to do them well. Before I left this office, two of my books had already been published.
“Yes, well... I suppose the man who owns nothing is free."
Gunnulf replied, "A man's possessions own him more than he owns them.”
The most dangerous temptations are not due to the active, sudden flames of desire, 'the lusts of the flesh,' but to the disinclinations of the flesh, its indolence and sluggishness, our tendency to become creatures of habit.
Feelings of longing seemed to burst from her heart; they ran in all directions, like streams of blood, seeking out paths to all the places in the wide landscape where she had lived, to all her sons roaming through the world, to all her dead lying under the earth.
Helge whispered aloud to the city of his dreams, whose streets his feet had never trod and whose buildings concealed not one familiar soul: 'Rome, Rome, eternal Rome.' And he grew shy before his own lonely being, and afraid, because he was deeply moved, although he knew that no one was there watching him. All the same, he turned around and hurried down toward the Spanish Steps.
Many different thoughts rise up in the darkness - like those gossamer plants that grow in the lake, oddly bewitching and pretty as they bob and sway; but enticing and sinister, they exert a dark pull as long as they're growing in the living, trickling mire. And yet as long as they're nothing but slimey brown clumps when the children pull them in to the boat. So many strange thoughts, both terrifying and enticing, grow in the night.
And when we give each other Christmas gifts in His name, let us remember that He has given us the sun and the moon and the stars, and the earth with its forests and mountains and oceans--and all that lives and move upon them. He has given us all green things and everything that blossoms and bears fruit and all that we quarrel about and all that we have misused--and to save us from our foolishness, from all our sins, He came down to earth and gave us Himself.
