Halldór Laxness Quotes page 2

“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.”

Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

“Nothing was said. And on crawled the little procession in the direction of Summerhouses, men and animals, men-animals, five souls. The pale red sun grazed the surface of the moorland bluffs on this northern winter's morning which was really only an evening. And yet it was midday. The light gilded the clouds of snow flying over the moors so that they seemed one unbroken ocean of fire, one radiant fire of gold with streaming flames and glimmering smoke from east to west over the whole frozen expanse. Through this golden fire of frost, comparable in its magic to nothing but the most powerful and elaborate witchcraft of the Ballads, lay their homeward way.”

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“He wandered for a long time along the canals and over the bridges... Steam rose from one boat where men were heating their tea water. He shouted to them and asked them to give him some tea. They asked who he was and he said that he was from Iceland, where Hell is. They invited him out to the boat and gave him something to drink and questioned him about Mount Hekla. He said that he was born and raised at the foot of the mountain and for that reason was called van Hekkenfeld. They asked whether a man could see down into Hell from the summit of Hekla, through the swarm of noxious birds that hovers eternally, shrieking and quarreling, over the crater. He said no, but added that he'd once caught one of these birds with a hooked pole that he'd brought with him up onto the mountain; they were similar to ravens, he said, except for their claws and beaks, which were iron. They asked whether such birds could be eaten and he laughed at their foolishness, but said on the other hand that one could use the claws for hooks and the beak for a pick.”

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book One, Part I: Icelandic Pioneers

“You have fettered yourself of your own free will, man—break the fetters!”

Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part I: Iceland's Bell

“My image will soon be obliterated; it was only an illusion. But even though I may fall, even though my image may be obliterated, there is one thing that will never fall and can never be obliterated, and that is the yearning of those in chains for liberty.”

Jórunn of Veghús
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Three: The House of the Poet

“To explain God would be to have no God, my little one.”

transcript of Örn's speech to the Laborers
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Three: The House of the Poet

“There is no other Úa than the one who has always lived with me and never gone from me for a single moment. She is closer to me than the flower of the field and the light of the glacier, because she is fused with my own breath. The one thing that remains is what lives deepest within yourself, even though you glide from one galaxy to another. Nothing can change that. And now let us have more shark meat.
- Pastor Jón talking with EmBi”

Ugla's father
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“[T]o anyone who weeps, life has some importance.”

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

“The correct understanding of life, let me tell you, is love despite everything. Love despite everything, that is the aim and object of life. Love, you see, is the only thing that pays in the long run, even though it might seem a dead loss in the short run.”

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book One: The Revelation of the Deity

“When I was young and walked along Breiðafjörður I never would have thought that such a wide variety of people inhabited the world. Here were many folk from the numerous city-states and counties of Italy: Milanese, Napolese and Sicilians, Sardinians, Savoyards, Venetians and Tuscans, along with the Romans themselves; here one could see the peoples of the six Spanish kingdoms: the Castilians, Aragonese, Catalans, Valencians, Majorcans, and Navarrans; gathered here were envoys from the different nations of the Empire, even from the nations that had adopted Luther's reforms: Bavarians, Germans and Croatians, Franconians, Westphalians, Rhinelanders, Saxons, Burgundians, Franks, Walloons, Austrians, and Styrians... I saw people from nations I knew nothing about, their countenances, the textures of their clothing, their grimy faces and their eyes filled with passion and tenacity. Most often, however, I found myself thinking about their countless feet, bare or in shoes, mostly certainly tired, yet somehow lively and hopeful; and the old crusade-dance that resounded through their musica: 'Fair are the fields, cloudless God's sky.' And suddenly I realized that Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir was gone. Not a single Icelander remained.”

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

“I have no idea whether my grandfather took notice of everything in it, or nothing. If he believed at all, he was just like those theologians who store their theology somewhere in a locked compartment of the brain, or rather, perhaps, like those travelers who carry a bottle of iodine in their luggage and take care to keep it tightly corked in case it leaks and ruins their belongings. To be honest, I think my grandfather Björn of Brekkukot would not have been significantly different if he had lived here in Iceland in pagan times, or if his home had been somewhere in the world where people never read from Vídalín's Book of Sermons but believed instead in the bull Apis, or the god Ra, or the bird Colibri.... "A Bible that costs half a hen? Pshaw!"”

Arnas describing a procession in Rome
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part II: The Fair Maiden

“You Danes really are a sorry lot if you think that the day will dawn when you'll get hold of Snæfríður, Iceland's sun.”

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“Gold is precious because it resembles the sun. Silver has the light of the moon.”

Þórður Narfason
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part II: The Fair Maiden

“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.”

the blind man at the Ölfus River
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part I: Iceland's Bell

“b>It's a common saying that the children of children are fortune's favorites.

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“To be a poet is to be a visitor on a distant shore until one dies. In the land where I belong, but which I shall never reach, individuals have no cares, and that is because industry runs by itself without anyone trying to steal from others. My land is a land of plenty; it is the world that Nature has given to mankind, where society is not a thieves' society, where the children aren't sickly but healthy and contented, and young men and women can fulfill their aspirations because it is natural to do so. In my world it is possible to fulfill all aspirations, and therefore all aspirations are in themselves good, quite unlike here, where people's aspirations are called wicked because it isn't possible to fulfill them.”

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“It's strange that all birds don't fly in the same way... I've heard that the wings of aeroplanes all conform to the same formula, whereas birds each conform to a formula of their own... All birds are perhaps a little wrong, because an absolute once-and-for-all formula for a bird has never been found, just as all novels are bad because the correct formula for a novel has never been found.”

Ólafur
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Three: The House of the Poet

“It's an old saying that one still has to know something, despite everything.”

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

“Since when has America with all its hordes of gangsters and beggars become God's Kingdom?”

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

“This is the place' is what the divinely-inspired leader is reported to have said when Salt Lake Valley opened out before the slavering oxen with blood on their hooves and the men who had managed to cross the wilderness even though their children and sweethearts still tarried in the sand. Sometimes I have the feeling that I am dead and have come to the land of eternity. Of such a land it says in a hymn I once knew, that there stood a wondrous palace on pillars, inlaid with gold and brighter than the sun... When I now look back across the ocean to the land whence I came, I glimpse behind me a sparse and barren coast... There stands my family, and looks sorrowing out to sea.”

the heckler at Brennugjá
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

“I have been told that at school I was the sort of simpleton who suffered from dux-disease. It is reckoned in Iceland that those who are afflicted by this disease can never become anything other than drunkards, journalists, or junior clerks... I was spiritually as well as physically in a state of suspended adolescence. Lessons came welling up out of me as if I were talking in my sleep. I could reel off the bones in a dog at the drop of a hat, any time at all, just as if I had them in my pockets; if I had been woken up at three o'clock in the morning, I would have detailed each and every one of them, just as if I had been lying on them.”

Stone Stanford, Steinar
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

“The God of the Jews was an absolute God, who believed in other gods himself, to be sure, but forbade me to obey them, contrary to our own beliefs in the North. We have many gods and obey them all, and they us, the god of the sea and the god of the land, the god of thunder and the god of poetry.”

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“Work on the one side, the home on the other—they were two walls in the one prison.”

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

“The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it; the historian tells lies in his simplicity and imagines he is telling the truth.”

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Three: The House of the Poet

“Three things, according to poets, are considered bliss in Iceland: hot rye-cakes, plump girls, and cold buttermilk.”

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

“Sell the country, bury bones. What else?”

Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

“It was not much fun being called a ghost for more than two hundred years, and each time a calf fell into a pool or a cow went dry or the roof fell in on people, it was always that damned ghost.”

the unself-conscious policeman
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“As a matter of fact, others are ready to help. There is for instance the Weather; and there is the Law of Gravity; and last but not least, Time. These are tough fellows. Night and day, always at it. And at it still. No one is a match for them.</b”

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

“This summer which was now passing—never had anyone lived such a summer! Nature had given him the happiness of a blossom. She gave him love and a palace, and put precious poetry into his mouth; it was all one long, unbroken romance. And now everything was lost, his poems, his love and his palace, withered, burnt; forlorn and helpless, he faced the desolation of winter.”

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

“They walked together like that all night, and there was no night, just a slight unreality, a momentary trance, with mist here and there as if the landscape were about to dissolve, and then nothing dissolved and the mist had vanished again. There was a crimson glow on the highest mountain ridges, and shining birds swarming in their thousands over the flame-gilded, mirror-smooth sea. And they went on talking together. Ólafur Kárason had no perception of the passing of time; only that voice with its dark, silk-edged, golden tones reverberated through his consciousness. When a man has lost what he loves most, there is no need to write poetry; the timber of a man's voice expresses all the poetry of life.”

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

“I do not see how the Creation can be turned into words, let alone letters, hardly even a fiction. History is always entirely different to what has happened. The facts are all fled from you before you start the story. History is simply a fact on its own. And the closer you try to approach the facts through history, the deeper you sink into fiction.”

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

“b>It is both more difficult and more complicated to die than people think. Even though the soul craves for nothing but extinction and oblivion forever, the body is a conservative master which will not give up until the very end.”

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

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

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

“One of the first things I had been taught as a child was never to believe a single word that was written in newspapers.”

Borgi
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

“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

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

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

“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)