“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.”
Garðar Hólm
Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)
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Halldór Laxness 216
Icelandic author 1902–1998Related quotes
Source: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea.”
The Fiddler Of Dooney http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1620/, st. 1
The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)

Before a long-term weather forecast given on Radio 4's PM[citation needed]
From PM and Broadcasting House

"I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet" http://www.csuchico.edu/zapatist/HTML/Archive/Communiques/etaJAN.html January, 2003

“Watch him. But don't try to imitate. Only VVS can play them.”
Source: John Wright to young batsman on VVS Laxman. http://www.scrolldroll.com/quotes-about-vvs-laxman-that-show-he-is-truly-very-very-special/

"I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet" http://www.csuchico.edu/zapatist/HTML/Archive/Communiques/etaJAN.html January, 2003