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| Translator | Tiina Nunnally |
| First Written | 1922 |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Origin | Norway |
| Publisher | Penguin Classics |
| ISBN-10 | 0141182350 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0141182353 |
| My Copy | cheap paperback |
| First Read | February 08, 2017 |
Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross
Continuing the really amazing feat of KL. Undset slowly strips away everything in Kristin's life. It's painful to read, but there's an air of inevitability about it that makes it seem not just tolerable but ... noble.
Kristin has several revolutions of understanding, where she has an emotional confession from someone, and realizes that neither party understood the other. Several times she learns that she's unintentionally hurt someone (her husband, her sister, her sons), and each time it's just devastating.
Noted on February 14, 2017
Lord, if only you would give me this and this and this and this, then I will thank you and ask for nothing more except for this and this and this...
Surely she had never asked God for anything except that He would let her have her will. And every time she had been granted what she asked for - for the most part. Now here she sat with a contrite heart - not because she has sinned against God but because she was unhappy that she had been allowed to follow her will to the road's end.
Quoted on February 14, 2017
[marked here just for its resemblance to Family Promise, a charity here in Lawrence]
Jofrid was home alone with the parish's charity cases, two old people and two children, whose turn it was to stay at Jorundgaard.
Quoted on February 14, 2017
Was this how she would see her struggle end? Had she conceived in her womb a flock of restless fledgling hawks that simply lay in her nest, waiting impatiently for the hour when their wings were strong enough to carry them beyond the most distant blue peaks? And their father would clap his hands and laugh: Fly, fly, my young birds.
They would take them with bloody threads from the roots of her heart when they flew off, and they wouldn't even know it. She would be left behind alone, and all the heartstrings, which had once bound her to this old home of hers, she had already sundered. That was how it would end, and she would be neither alive nor dead.
Quoted on February 14, 2017
It was probably Brother Edvin who once said that those condemned to Hell had no wish to give up their torment: hatred and sorrow were their pleasures. That was why Christ could never save them. Back then this had sounded to her like wild talk. An icy shiver ran through her; now she was beginning to understand what the monk had meant.
Quoted on February 14, 2017