Quotes from Halldor Laxness

There are few things that fill the soul of man with greater disappointment than to wake up when everybody else is asleep, especially if it happens to be really early in the morning. Not before one is awake does one realize how far one's dreams have transcended reality.

Two human beings have such difficulty in understanding each other - there is nothing so sad as two human beings.

Hef ég drepið mann eða hef ég ekki drepið mann? Hver hefur drepið mann og hver hefur ekki drepið mann? Hvenær drepur maður mann og hvenær drepur maður ekki mann? Fari í helvíti sem ég drap mann. Og þó.

Alt sem þú biður um skaltu fá.

If you get into danger, either you perish or you escape.

The leak that comes from the outside harms no one,' he stated once more. 'It is the leak that one finds indoors that is the worst.' When one is unmarried, one must tell people to shut up in a roundabout fashion.

That blasted family could never look at a living thing without wanting to make a profit out of it, preferably by killing it.

But perhaps no distance is greater than that which separates a poor family in the same country

Það sem þrek hennar hafði grætt, það hafði viðkvæmnin mist.

Life in Oseyri was lived in fish and consisted of fish, and human beings were a sort of abortion which Our Lord had made out of cooked fish and perhaps a handful of rotten potatoes and a drop of oatmeal gruel.

I know perfectly well that it is impossible, according to arithmetic and scholarly books, to live in a far valley off a handful of ewes and two low yield cows. But we live, I say. You children all lived; your sisters now have sturdy children in far-off districts. And what you are now carrying under your heart will also live and be welcome, little one, despite arithmetic and scholarly books.

The fact is that it is utterly pointless to make anyone a generous offer unless he is a rich man; rich men are the only people who can accept a generous offer. To be poor is simply the peculiar human condition of not being able to take advantage of a generous offer. The essence of being a poor peasant is the inability to avail oneself of the gifts that politicians offer to promise and to be left at the mercy of ideals that only make rich richer and the poor poorer.

So deep was her sympathy with little Snow White in joy and sorrow, in happiness and tribulation, that her breast heaved and her eyes were filled with tears; but it was not the bitter, crushed feeling of one who suffers because of the evil men have done him, rather the emotion of one who would willingly live and die for the good that there is in life.

Man is more perfect than god. Although this woman's doctrine, in which she was brought up from childhood, told her than all men were lost sinners, I have never heard her censure a man with so much as half a word. All her life is symbolized in the only words which she knows in her dotage. Please do; and, God bless you.

Those were good days. They were serene days and quite undemonstrative, like the best days in one's life; the boy never forgot them. Nothing happens; one simply lives and breathes and wishes for nothing more, and nothing more.

The drowsiness of midnight, so sweet, so heavy, began again to flow through his limbs; and little by little, like a hundred grains of sand, his consciousness filtered down into the abyss of his sleep-world until oblivion had once more filled it full.

She herself had given up washing long ago, and besides, people no longer believed in stale urine, either for one purpose or another.

A fat servant is not much of a man. A beaten servant is a great man, because in his breast freedom has its home.

In Brekkukot, words were too precious to use -- because they meant something; our conversation was like pristine money before inflation; experience was too profound to be capable of expression; only the bluebottle was free.

But whoever thinks that beauty is something he can enjoy exclusively for himself just by abandoning other people and closing his eyes to the human life of which he is part—he is not the friend of beauty. He who doesn't fight every day of his life to the last breath against the representatives of evil, against the living images of evil who rule Sviðinsvík—he blasphemes by taking the word beauty into his mouth.

When I was a child I was told that whoever swallowed a hock-bone would one day own land, she said. Have you tried that? I was told a sheep's hock-bone bought a croft, a cow's an estate.

Children should live a wholesome and natural life and go about with a mussel in one corner of their mouths and a shrimp in the other instead of sweets.

Yet everyone knows that money is fundamentally an invention, a fiction.

The history of the centuries in this valley is the history of an independent man who grapples barehanded with the spectre which bears a new and ever a newer name. Sometimes the spectre is some half-divine fiend who lays a curse on his land. Sometimes it breaks his bones in the guise of a norn. Sometimes it destroys his croft in the form of a monster. And yet, always, to all eternity, it is the same spectre assailing the same man century after century.