Halldór Laxness citations (216 citations, Page 4)

Halldór Laxness: 216 citations0 J'aime

Halldór Laxness: Citations en anglais

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

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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

“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”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness livre Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

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

“There is no such thing as morality—only varingly expedient conventions. What to one race is a crime, is virtue to another; crime in one era is virtue in another; even a crime in one class of society is at the same time and in the same society virtue in another class... It makes no difference whether people are called good or bad; we are all here; now; there is only one world in existence, and in it there prevail either expedient or inexpedient conditions for those who are alive.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness livre The Atom Station

the organist
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness livre Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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

“At this time, Icelanders were said to be the poorest people in Europe, just as their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had been, all the way back to the earliest settlers; but they believed that many long centuries ago there had been a Golden Age in Iceland, when Icelanders had not been mere farmers and fisherman as they were now, but royal-born heroes and poets who owned weapons, gold, and ships.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

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

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

Borgi
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

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

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness livre The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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

“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”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness livre The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

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

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness livre Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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

“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”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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

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

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness livre The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

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

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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

“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?”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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

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

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness livre Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness livre Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Saknússemm II
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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness

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

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

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness livre The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Halldór Laxness livre Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

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

Halldór Laxness citations Page 4

Halldór Laxness: Citations en anglais

Halldór Laxness citations
Page 4