Henrik Ibsen Quotes

“I only feel my life unspeakably empty. No one to live for anymore.”

“Nils, a woman who has once sold herself for another’s sake, doesn’t do it a second time.”

“And besides – he’s so proud of being a man – it’d be so painful and humiliating for him to know that he owed anything to me. It’d completely wreck our relationship.”

“Well, you see, there are some people whom one loves, and others whom it’s almost more fun to be with.”

“How warm and cosy our home is, Nora. Here is shelter for you; here I will protect you like a hunted dove that I have saved from a hawk’s claws.”

“Bought, did you say? All these things? Has my little spendthrift been wasting money again?”

“Nils, suppose we two shipwrecked souls could join hands? . . . Castaways have a better chance of survival together than on their own.”

“When I lived with papa, he used to tell me what he thought about everything, so that I never had any opinions but his. And if I did have any of my own, I kept them quiet, because he wouldn’t have liked them. He called me his little doll, and he played with me just the way I played with my dolls.”

“I believe that I am first and foremost a human being, like you – or anyway, that I must try to become one. I know most people think as you do, Torvald, and I know there’s something of the sort to be found in books. But I’m no longer prepared to accept what people say and what’s written in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.”

“Do you suppose I am going to make myself ridiculous before my whole staff, to let people think that I am a man to be swayed by all sorts of outside influence?”

“No one has said I borrowed the money. I could have got it in some other way. I could have got it from an admirer. When a girl’s as pretty as I am.”