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Halldór Laxness Quotes
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Halldór Kiljan Laxness was a twentieth-century Icelandic writer. Laxness wrote poetry, newspaper articles, plays, travelogues, short stories, and novels. Major influences included August Strindberg, Sigmund Freud, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Bertolt Brecht and Ernest Hemingway. In 1955 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; he is the only Icelandic Nobel laureate.

✵ 23. April 1902 – 8. February 1998  •  Other names هالدور لاکسنس, Հալդոր Լաքսնես
Halldór Laxness photo
Halldór Laxness: 216 quotes5 likes

Halldór Laxness Quotes

“All that you ask for, you shall have.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Bui Arland
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“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 book The Atom Station

Bui Arland
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“And when I say the world is governed by nothing but demons, who will continue to be demons until they have destroyed the world, I am not using profanities; on the contrary, demon is a scientific term, a formula covering a specific chemical composition without connotations from politics, religion, or moral philosophy.... Here among us on the lowest rung of the world of life, no attention is paid to books unless they are written by chemically analyzed demons, or at least for them. Poets and philosophers are respected in proportion to the contempt and disgust they feel for the creation of life. Give this day our daily war is the prayer of those who govern countries. Kill, kill, said the outlaw Skuggasveinn...”

Halldór Laxness book Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

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

“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.</b”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“Dust, who is not dust? I am dust. But I am your Member of Parliament, nevertheless.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Bui Arland
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“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

Jón of Skagi
Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“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

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“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

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

“When Icelanders were worthy of the name, it was considered an accepted duty to avenge with the sword the sort of crime you have committed against my family. It's a bitter thing to be living at a time when one may not challenge to single combat the man who has disgraced one's family, and carve a blood-eagle on his back!”

Halldór Laxness

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

“The most remarkable thing about man's dreams is that they all come true; this has always been the case, though no one would care to admit it.”

Halldór Laxness

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book Two, Part I: Hard Times

“b>A man is not independent unless he has the courage to stand alone.

Halldór Laxness

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book Two, Part III: Conclusion

“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

Garðar Hólm
Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“Everyone always believes everything nasty of everyone else, and especially if it's a lie.”

Halldór Laxness

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

“When has human fortune ever been regarded as something better than a crime, or been enjoyed in any other way than in secret, directly contrary to the laws of God and man?”

Halldór Laxness

Arnas Arnæus
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part II: The Fair Maiden

“What made Ingolfur Arnarson a great man was first and foremost his ideals, his unquenchable love of mankind, his conviction that the people needed improved conditions of life and better facilities for cultural advancement, his determination to mitigate his fellow men's sufferings by establishing a better form of government in the country... Middlemen and other parasites would no longer be allowed to batten on the farming classes. Ingolfur wanted to elevate the farmer's life to a position of honor and dignity, not in word alone, but in deed.”

Halldór Laxness

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

“When my daughter wakes up on her first morning in God's City of Zion, the sun will rise over Sierra Benida and shine upon the saints: the sun of the All-Wisdom; the sun of the Beehive, the Sego-lily, and Seagull... My son will understand that Egill Skallagrímsson and the Norse kings live here in Spanish Fork, but that they now have the gleam of righteousness in their eyes and have become leaders in the Stake, Seventies, and High Priests.”

Halldór Laxness

Steinar
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

“It makes no difference where one sleeps in God's City of Zion, the air is everywhere just as all-embracingly pleasing.”

Halldór Laxness

Steinar
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

“b>The love which demands nothing but beauty itself and lives in selfless worship... is the love that no disappointment can ever conquer, perhaps not even death itself”

Halldór Laxness

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

“The fire's hottest for the one who burns himself.”

Halldór Laxness

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

“It's you who are strange. Talking to you is like talking to someone who has no shadow.”

Halldór Laxness

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

“My opinion has always been this, that you ought to never 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 just as well look you up this morning.”

Halldór Laxness

Bjartur talking with Asta Sollilja
Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book Two, Part III: Conclusion

“Yes, it is a painful lot to be a poet and to love both God and man by the farthest northern seas!”

Halldór Laxness

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

“Icelanders! You are the descendants of Nordic vikings! Down with Irish slaves!”

Halldór Laxness

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

“And so it went on, day after day. This was not the first time that those who had at first smiled at him turned their backs on him and began to think of themselves isntead of thinking of him. Sometimes it was as if you understood people's souls; a few days later, you understood nothing. One day you were kissed, and it meant everything; next day, you were not kissed.... He consoled himself by looking at his exercise books with the poems approaching the thousand total soon, and more. Perhaps the world would some day understand that the heart existed. Some day.</b”

Halldór Laxness

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

“I didn't expect you to have learnt to smile yet. When one is born, one only knows how to cry. It's only very gradually that one learns to smile.”

Halldór Laxness

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

“Learn never to look forward to anything. It is the beginning of knowing how to endure everything.”

Halldór Laxness

Thórarna, the woman from Landbrot
Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“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 book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“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 book The Atom Station

the Prime Minister
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“Flowers are immortal. You cut them in autumn and they grow again in spring—somewhere.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

the organist
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“Dear darling Americans, Jesus let them come with the atom bomb quick.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Cleopatra
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“It is a waste of words to try to impute to the Creator democratic ideas or social virtues; or to think that one can move Him with weeping and wailing, and persuade Him with logic and legal quibbles. Nothing is so pointless as words.”

Halldór Laxness book Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Pastor Jón's eulogy to Dr. Sýngmann
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

“[T]ime passed and there was really no romance in life anymore, only the tedious tranquility of marriage without excitement or curiosity, the dull routine of making a comfortable living with nothing to nourish the imagination.”

Halldór Laxness

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

“Slow good luck is best.”

Halldór Laxness

Álfgrímur's grandmother
Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“White ravens are rare.”

Halldór Laxness

Björn of Brekkukot
Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“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

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“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

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“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

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“If you’re fond of someone, you don’t care even if he doesn’t live in a palace and even if all the banks where he has deposits and all the worldcities where he is famous don’t exist.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“One night you discover to your great surprise that you have not spent all your money that day, he said. Next morning you wake up early and go out and buy yourself a hat – and when you have got the hat you realize that you now have even more money in your pocket. You invite a friend, two or three of them perhaps, to come with you to a restaurant, and you eat your fill of all the best food and wines available there. When you simply can’t force down another bite and you leave the restaurant, you discover that you’ve made yet another haul while you were sitting inside. You become flurried and go and buy a house with a garden to try to rid yourself of this trash, but no sooner have you paid for the house cash down than you notice that your money has multiplied through the purchase. Now you are seized with a kind of frenzy that Björn of Brekkukot would never understand, far less your grandmother. You set off travelling round and round the world, pouring out money with both hands to other demented vagrants wherever you go, and you don’t even dare to open your letters because you know that they will all say the same thing: your deposits at I don’t know how many banks all over the world are still growing with ever increasing speed.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“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

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“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

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“Genuine gold does not exist, children, he said. Gold is by its nature not genuine.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“I’m afraid I’m not very good at Latin, said the superintendent. On the other hand I sometimes think about arithmetic; and in particular about one number – the number One. But I will admit that it is also the most incomprehensible number in the world. Beyond this particular dimension I know only one thing which is supernatural, even though it may well be the reality that affects mortal men most deeply; and that is Time. And when one comes to think about this strange place I was telling you about, the world that is only One, and its connection with the only supernatural thing we know, Time, then everything ceases to be higher or lower than anything else, larger or smaller.”

Halldór Laxness

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“...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

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

“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

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)