Quotes from Halldor Laxness

Anyone who doesn't know others doesn't know himself.

My opinion has always been this. That you ought never to give up as long as you live, even though they have stolen everything from you. If nothing else, you can always call the air you breath your own, or at any rate you can claim that you have it on loan. Yes, lass, last night I ate stolen bread and left my son among men who are going to use pick-handles on the authorities, so I thought I might as well look you up this morning.

Where the glacier meets the sky, the land ceases to be earthly, and the earth becomes one with the heavens; no sorrows live there anymore, and therefore joy is not necessary; beauty alone reigns there, beyond all demands.

She was like defenceless Nature, that withers in the blast because it has shelter neither of God nor of men; human beings do not give one another shelter; and God? We shall see, when in the end we are dead of consumption. Perhaps the Almighty had made a note of all that she had had to suffer. All the same she felt that evening that she was not too old once more to view the future in a dream; in a new dream. To be able to look forward is to live.

Was this perhaps life, then?—to have loved one summer in youth and not to have been aware of it until it was over, some sea-wet footprints on the floor and sand in the prints, the fragrance of a woman, soft loving lips in the dusk of a summer night, sea birds; and then nothing more; gone.

All great wealth was inconsistent with common sense. (from 'The Fish can Sing

Somewhere, out in the infinite distance, lay the spring, at least in God's mind, like babies that are not yet conceived in the mother's womb. (from The Fish can Sing)

The light of the world had more or less taken leave of this man, for he was almost blind. (from 'The Fish can Sing')

It is both more difficult and more complicated to die than people think.

It's a pity we don't whistle at one another, like birds. Words are misleading. I am always trying to forget words. That is why I contemplate the lilies of the field, but in particular the glacier. If one looks at the glacier for long enough, words cease to have any meaning on God's earth.

Now pastor Jón Prímus laughed. Philosophy and theology have no effect on him, much less plain common sense. Impossible to convince this man by arguments. But humour he always listens to, even though it be ill humour.

Grandma took her wheel and spun. And the wheel-whir of the long days filled the croft; and this one wheel spinning was like the wheel of time, which carries our souls away to its own land.

For once the crofter was at a a rather loss for words, for to him nothing has ever been more completely unintelligible than the reasoning that is bred of tears.

He disliked tears, he has always disliked tears, had never understood them, and sometimes lost his temper over them; but he felt now that he could not rebuke this flower of his life, this innocent form, water and youth are inseparable companions, and besides it's Christmas night. So he merely hinted again that she must have forgotten again that he had promised to build her a house.

Nonsense,' said Bjartur, 'there's nothing lucky about it at all. I will have no truck with superstition. She can lie where she is, the old bitch.' 'Let me down to give her a stone, Bjartur.' 'What the devil does she want with a stone? No stone from me or mine. We pay our dues to the living, which is more to the point than pandering to people that have been fried in hell for centuries.

There is a holy story that tells of a man who was fulfilled by sowing his enemy's field one night. Bjartur's story is the story of a man who sowed his enemy's field all his life, day and night. Such is the story of the most independent man in the country. Moors; more moors. From the ravine there came an eerie echoing rumble as the headstone crashed its way down, and the bitch sprang to the brink, barking wildly.

In his contradictions he was as much an enigma as the country itself: a religious devotee out of spite at the soullessness of men who thought of nothing but dogs and sheep, a scientific breeder of sheep because of his contempt for sheep, the Icelandic pastor of a thousand years' folk-stories, his presence alone was a comfortable reassurance that all was as it should be.

He wept only as children weep when they suffer injustice at the hands of those stronger than themselves. It is the most bitter weeping in the world. That was what happened to his [only] book; it was taken from him and burned. And he was left standing naked and without a book on the first day of summer.

Pastor Jón Prímus: Do you remember when Úa shook her curls? Do you remember when she looked at us and laughed? Did she not accept the Creation? Did she reject anything? Did she contradict anything? It was a victory for the Creator, once and for all. Everything that was workaday and ordinary, everything that had limitations, ceased to exist when she came: the world perfect, and nothing mattered anymore. What does Úa mean when she sends people telegrams saying she is dead?

I'm an extremely wealthy man. I own the sky. I have invested all my capital in the sun. I'm not bad-tempered, as you seem to imagine, nor do I bear grudges. But like all wealthy men, I'm a little frightened of losing my fortune.

A new generation forgets the specters that may have tormented the old… And yet, always, to all eternity, it is the same specter assailing the same man century after century.

Is it not amazing that around a man as cold as I am, there should always be fire? Sometimes it tries to burn me, but I usually collect my things and leave.

And after having seen the pale necromancers who in that room with its many forgeries of Nature had talked long windedly about mildewed bones to him who dwells inaccessible in the mountain tops, that fairy person deepest in our breasts, I was refreshed and comforted by the memory of this rugged image of my origin.

Immoral women do not exist, said the organist. That this only a superstition. On the other hand there exist women who sleep thirty times with one man, and women who sleep once with thirty men.