Edvard Munch quotes

I was walking along the road with two friends – when the sun went down. The Sky suddenly turned blood-red. I paused, leaned against the fence tired to death – above the blue-black fjord and city blood in flaming tongues hovered. My friends walked on and I stayed behind quaking with angst – and I felt as though a vast endless scream passed through nature.

Jeg gik bortover veien med to venner – så gik solen ned. Himmelen ble pludseli blodi rø – og jeg følte et pust af vemod – en sugende smerte under hjertet. Jeg standset, lænet mig til gjæret træt til døden – over den blåsorte fjor og by lå blod i ildtunger. Mine venner gik videre og jeg sto igjen skjælvende af angest – og jeg følte det gik et stort uennelig skrik gennem naturen.

One shall no longer paint interiors, people reading and women knitting. They will be people who are alive, who breathe and feel, suffer and love.

I painted only what I remembered without adding anything to it – without the details that I no longer saw. Hence the simplicity of the pictures – the apparent emptiness.

By painting the colours and lines and shapes I had seen in an emotional state – I wished to recapture the quivering quality of the emotional atmosphere like a phonograph.

The Frieze is intended as a poem about life, about love and about death.

The Frieze is intended as a number of decorative pictures, which together would represent an image of life. The sinuous shoreline weaves through them all, beyond it is the ocean, which is in constant motion.

The following three years I collected several drafts and pictures for a frieze – that was exhibited for the first time in Berlin in 1893.