Halldór Laxness: Trending quotes

“Pray God for guidance, man. It's thirty-odd years since I sold the last copy of Orvar-Odds saga. The country stands on an entirely different cultural footing nowadays. I can recommend the story of King Solomon's Mines there, all about the hero of Umslopogaas, in his own way a great man, and in my opinion no whit inferior to Orvar-Oddur.”

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“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 ends up either as Pétur Þríhross's poet, or his secretary. 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.”

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book One, Part II: Free of Debt

“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.</b”

Örn Úlfar
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

“It's a pity we don't whistle at one another, like birds. Words are misleading.”

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“Do you know that these mountains you're looking at don't really exist at all? Or can't you see that they belong more to the sky than the earth? All this enchanting blueness which enthralls you is an illusion.”

Pastor Jón Prímus
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

“The poet felt completely free now as he stood there on the deck in his collar and boots, sailing past new and ever newer districts; even if he did not own this land's resources, he owned its beauty.</b”

Örn Úlfar
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

“He who weeps does not die; weeping is a sign of life; weep, and your life is worth something again.”

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Four: The Beauty of the Heavens

“When's there ever been a decent saint who didn't start out as a thief?”

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“After Bjartur had become a person of great worth, even he was prone to admit on occasion that life had sometimes been pretty hard in Summerhouses in the old days, but one has to take a few knocks if one wants to get on, surely, and anyway we never ate other folk's bread. Other folk's bread is the most virulent form of poison that a free and independent man can take; other folk's bread is the only thing that can rob him of independence and the one true freedom.”

Jón Hreggviðsson
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part III: Fire in Copenhagen

“How is one to have any respect for the world where nothing else matters except who can lie the most plausibly and steal the most?”

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book Two, Part II: Years of Prosperity

“No one is so busy that he hasn't the time to dismantle a work of art.”

Þórunn of Kambar
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

“Of all the creatures that man kills for his amusement there is only one that he kills out of hatred—other men. Man hates nothing as much as himself. That is why war is called the leprosy of the human soul.”

Pastor Jón Prímus
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

“My children have never brought any shame upon their father. They have been independent children, my children.”

Saknússemm II
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

“When they were busy molding the upper floor, it was discovered that the cellar had begun to crack. When the foreman joiner and the foreman mason were summoned, they announced that these cracks must have been caused by the earthquakes that had occurred that summer. Bjartur said that no one had noticed any earthquakes that particular summer, not on the upper surface of the earth at least. "There were earthquakes in Korea," said the foreman joiner.”

Bjartur
Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book Two, Part II: Years of Prosperity

“Good news travels slowly but arrives in the end, thank goodness. Bad news always arrives a day too soon.”

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book Two, Part II: Years of Prosperity

“People who like to display complicated technique in their verse are more given to pride themselves on their work than are those who write for their own solace.”

Steinar's wife
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

“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.”

Einar in "Shepherds' Meet"
Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book One, Part I: Icelandic Pioneers

“How much can one sacrifice for the sake of one's pride? Everything, of course—if one is proud enough.”

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

“The mountain reminds one of an upturned earthenware bowl, the glazing a little bluish at times, but sometimes like gold-rimmed transparent Chinese porcelain, especially if the sun is low in the west over the sea, because then the rays play on the glacier in two directions.”

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)