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Halldór Laxness

214 quotes

“Why won't the king of Denmark leave us our names? We have done nothing against him. We deserve no less respect than he does. My forefathers were kings of land and sea . . . Our skalds composed poetry and told stories in the language of King Óðinn himself, who came from Ásgarður when Europe still spoke the language of slaves.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The glimmer continued to play about the vault of heaven. To the west one could see the roofs of nearby mansions and the tower of Our Lady's Church silhouetted against the dull red glow of embers in the darkness of the night.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Night. Two Icelandic Jóns stagger waywardly through a burning city. The learned Grindavíkian is bawling like a child. The farmer from Rein plods silently behind. The fire of Copenhagen is at their heels, driving them on in the direction of Nørreport. The sea of flames turns terrified folk into frantic silhouettes, fleshly phantoms.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My job was to keep the house clean, get the children off to school, help the cook-housekeeper, and serve at table. The house was much more perfect than the sort of gilt-bordered Christmas-card-Heaven that a crooked-nosed woman would sacrifice everything to attain in the next world: it was an all-electric house, with machines being plugged in and started up all day long; there was no such thing as a fire; heat came from hot-springs underground, and the glowing embers in the fireplace were made of glass.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You have a faint education look about you. An educated girl never has an educated look. I cannot stand an educated look on women. It's Communism. Look at me, I passed my University entrance, but I don't show it.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have always felt that I was different from others. I felt it when I was small. I felt that there was a soul in me. I saw the world from a height of many thousand meters. Even when I was thrashed it was of no concern to me; I could tuck Reykjavik under my arm and go away with it.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the first things I had been taught as a child was never to believe a single word that was written in newspapers.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How much can one sacrifice for the sake of one's pride? Everything, of course—if one is proud enough.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I stood in the middle of the room and began to study the pictures in the house. I had often looked at these ten- or even twenty-centimeter mountains which seemed to have been made sometimes of porridge, sometimes of bluish sago pudding, sometimes a mash of curds—sometimes even like an upturned bowl with Eiriks Glacier underneath; and I had never been able to understand where I was meant to be placed, because anyone who comes from the north and has lived opposite a mountain cannot understand a mountain in a picture in the south.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The reason a man talks is to hide his thoughts.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In actual fact, no man is honest when sober; in actual fact, you cannot believe a single word that a sober man says. I wish I were drunk myself.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I swear—swear—swear: by everything which is and has been sacred to this nation from the beginning: Iceland shall not be sold.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Suicide—masturbation multiplied by itself!”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To walk home alone at night is a disaster, in novels. Some girls confuse the state of being in love and being lonely, and think they are the former when in fact they are the latter; in love with everyone and no one, just because they are without a man.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thank the Lord, we subsidize our own debauchery first of all before we subsidize the debauchery of others.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So hopelessly incapable was I of understanding better folk that I did not even know how to keep a servile tongue in my head. In a flash there appeared before my mind the difference between the two worlds in which we lived, this woman and I; although I was staying under her roof we were such poles apart from one another that it was only with half justification possible to classify us together as human beings; we were both vertebrates, certainly, even mammals, but there all resemblance ended; any human society of which both of us were members was merely an empty phrase.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no such thing as morality—only varingly expedient conventions. What to one race is a crime, is virtue to another; crime in one era is virtue in another; even a crime in one class of society is at the same time and in the same society virtue in another class . . . It makes no difference whether people are called good or bad; we are all here; now; there is only one world in existence, and in it there prevail either expedient or inexpedient conditions for those who are alive.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's a common saying that the children of children are fortune's favorites.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He who weeps does not die; weeping is a sign of life; weep, and your life is worth something again.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dear darling Americans, Jesus let them come with the atom bomb quick.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To explain God would be to have no God, my little one.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dust, who is not dust? I am dust. But I am your Member of Parliament, nevertheless.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The words themselves say least of all, if in fact they say anything; what really informs us is the inflection of the voice (and no less so if it is restrained), the breathing, the heartbeat, the muscles round the mouth and eyes, the dilation and conctraction of the pupils, the strength or the weakness in the knees, as well as the chain of mysterious reactions in the nerves and the secretions from hidden glands whose names one never knows even though one has read about them in books; all that is the essence of a conversation—the words are more or less incidental.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All that you ask for, you shall have.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sell the country, bury bones. What else?”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Flowers are immortal. You cut them in autumn and they grow again in spring—somewhere.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father. And though I would never subscribe to such a statement wholeheartedly, I would be the last person to reject it out of hand. For my own part, I would express such a doctrine without any suggestion of bitterness against the world, or rather without the hurt which the mere sound of the words implies.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It goes without saying that if there were anything happening in the room you never heard the clock at all, no more than if it did not exist; but when all was quiet and the visitors had gone and the table had been cleared and the door shut, then it would start up again, as steady as ever; and if you listened hard enough you could sometimes make out a singing note in its workings, or something very like an echo.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was odd that I should discover eternity in this way, long before I knew what eternity was, and even before I had learned the proposition that all man are mortal - yes, while I was actually living in eternity myself. It was as if a fish were suddenly to discover the water it swam in. I mentioned this to my grandfather one day when we happened to be alone in the living-room.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When my grandfather was born there were barely two thousand people living in the capital; in my own childhood there were nearly five thousand. In grandfather's childhood the only people who counted were a few government officials and a few foreign merchants, mainly Jews from Schleswig and Holstein who spoke Low German and called themselves Danes . . . The rest of the town's inhabitants were cottagers who went out to the fishing and sometimes owned a small share in a cow, or had a few sheep. They had little rowing-boats, on which they could sometimes hoist a sail.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These problems never seemed to baffle my grandfather nor cause him any anxiety; difficulties which in most people's eyes would have led to endless complications were disposed of by my grandfather almost without thinking, with the easy assurance of a sleepwalker who strolls along a ledge halfway down a hundred-foot precipice—yes, I am tempted to say with the same disregard for the laws of nature as a ghost passing through locked doors.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is anything but easy trying to speak of a person one knows so little about but who is nevertheless so close to me.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When someone from Skagafjörður was settled comfortably against our gable-wall and was launched on to the Úlfar-rímur set to a Skagafjörður chant, with that obligatory opening about King Cyrus, there opened up before us a whole wide world of heroic poetry all the way to the Orient, fitfully lit by strange flashes of illumination.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we talked about Danish novels, it was as if we had in mind a vague impression of Dostoyevsky and those other story-tellers who appear to have spilled a great mass of tar which then, obeying only the laws of gravity, somehow oozes along formlessly into every crack and crevice.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hope that famous critics will not class me with certain devotees of death and doom if I say here that I think that funerals in our churchyard gave me more entertainment than most other things when I was a little boy.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“White ravens are rare.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Curiosity can be called a virtue or a vice, depending on what kind of elementary ethics one reads; in our house at Brekkukot, curiosity was considered on a par with thievishness.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...life has taught me to make no distinction between a hero and a little man, between great events and small trifles. From my point of view, men and events are all more or less the same size.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know perfectly well that I am nothing to anyone. But the middle finger is no longer than the pinky if one measures both against infinity; or if one clenches one's fist . . . . Even if a mouse came to me and said that it was going to fly over the ocean, and an eagle said it was thinking of digging itself a hole in the ground, I would say, 'Go ahead.'”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Genuine gold does not exist, children,” he said. “Gold is by its nature not genuine.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My mother once sent me out to buy pepper, and I have not returned home yet.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Learn never to look forward to anything. It is the beginning of knowing how to endure everything.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“October passed, and there was no change inside the cubicle; except that the woman only became paler and more lifeless. Until finally the time came when she became transparent; she underwent that transformation, that transguration of countenance that sometimes comes to sufferers when the last of their strength ebbs away.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A tiny light had been lit in a cottage on Álftanes; probably someone was going out fishing. Often there was frost and frozen snow, and the ice creaked in the night. Somewhere out in the infinite distance lay the spring, at least in God's mind, like the babies that are not yet conceived in the mother's womb.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wonder what my grandfather Björn of Brekkukot really thought what Latin was? Did he think it was the magic Sesame which opened all cliffs in Iceland? If so, I am not at all sure that he was all that far from the truth. Where fish leaves off in Iceland, Latin takes over.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I felt that I was dying, and perhaps I did die a little, or rather began to die in the way that the cocoon of the chrysalis cracks at the end of winter; but unfortunately I did not die so thoroughly that I achieved new life like a butterfly.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some voices never manage to break properly. But in all good men there lurks a true note, I won't say like a mouse in a trap, but rather like a mouse between wall and wainscoting.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You asked me whether you could learn to sing. I don't know. It could well be that you have the makings of a singer. It could well be that the world will give you the best that it has: glory, power, honor, what else is there? Palaces and parks, perhaps? Or merry meadows? And then what?”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I say, and have always said, and will always say: the fish that does not sing throughout the whole world is a dead fish.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Listen, don't look so depressed, old fellow. This is what all of Heine's poems are like, it's only peasants who don't laugh at them; or rather, perhaps, Calvinists. Abroad, it's the normal practice that if someone is looking really sad in the street, a horde of fat men comes running over waving checkbooks and hire him for a circus; they teach people like that to ride a bicycle that disintegrates when they try to mount it, or else make them play a stringless fiddle with a broomstick.”
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) said by 1998 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source