Halldór Laxness Quotes

169 Sourced Quotes

Human beings are constantly inventing new ways of maltreating one other. C'est la vie.

Halldór Laxness
In the end one is no longer sure which is the greatest evildoer, the man who gets up early or the man who goes to bed late.

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

Halldór Laxness
I have always felt that I was different from others. I felt it when I was small. I felt that there was a soul in me. I saw the world from a height of many thousand meters. Even when I was thrashed it was of no concern to me; I could tuck Reykjavik under my arm and go away with it.

Halldór Laxness
He wrote down everything he saw and heard, and most of his thoghts, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose. It could take him many hours to write in his diary a survey of one full day: everything was an experience, any noteworthy observation which some nameless person might make was a new vista, any insignificant piece of information was a new sunrise, any ordinary poem he read for the first time was the beginning of a new epoch like a flight around the globe; the world was multiform, magnificent and opulent, and he loved it.

Halldór Laxness
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.

Halldór Laxness
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
My mother once sent me out to buy pepper, and I have not returned home yet.

Halldór Laxness
It's a useful habit to never believe more than half of what people tell you, and not to concern yourself with the rest. Rather keep your mind free and your path your own.

Halldór Laxness
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
I've never had a grandmother, a great-grandmother, nor a great-great-grandmother. I never even had a mother. I have certainly missed a great deal of love thereby, but fortune has compensated me by not giving me the capacity to hate anyone, neither nations nor individuals. If candlesticks and church bells have been plundered from my ancestors, then I'm only grateful that I'm so ignorant about genealogy.

Halldór Laxness
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.

Halldór Laxness
You can take everything from me except the freedom to look up at the sky occasionally.

Halldór Laxness
If I have a face that rejoices in God's grace, my brother, it is because I have learned more from those who have lived within these [prison] walls than from those who live outside them. I have learned more from those who have fallen down than those who have remained upright.

Halldór Laxness
One asks and asks and always the answers become more incomprehensible than the question. In the end one becomes an idiot.

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

Halldór Laxness
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.

Halldór Laxness
In the afterlife, people never forget to feed the dog.

Halldór Laxness
It's an honor to be beheaded. Even a little churl becomes a man by being beheaded.

Halldór Laxness
It's a common saying that the children of children are fortune's favorites.

Halldór Laxness
I could best believe that love was some sort of rubbish thought up by the romantic geniuses who were now going to start bellowing like cows, or even dying; at least, there is no mention of love in Njal's Saga, which is nevertheless better than any romantic literature. I had lived for twenty years with the best people in the country, my father and mother, and never heard love mentioned. This couple begat us children, certainly; but not from love; rather, as an element of the simple life of poor people who have no pastimes. On the other hand I had never heard a cross word pass between them all my life—but is that love? I hardly think so. I think love is a pastime amongst sterile folk in towns, and takes the place of the simple life.

Halldór Laxness
It's both ludicrous and embarrassing to recall one's youth.

Halldór Laxness
Anyone who doesn't know others doesn't know himself.

Halldór Laxness
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
He swore repeatedly, ever the more violently the unsteadier his legs became, but to steel his senses he kept his mind fixed persistently on the world-famous battles of the rhymes. He recited the most powerful passages one after another over and over again, dwelling especially on the devilish heroes, Grimur Ægir and Andri. It was Grimur he was fighting now, he thought... but now an end would be put to the deadly feud, for now the stage was set for the final struggle.

Halldór Laxness
When I discovered that history is a fable, and a poor one at that, I started looking for a better fable, and found theology.

Halldór Laxness
Was all human endeavor then, even the beautiful of the world, of so little consequence compared with murder?

Halldór Laxness
For every day that God gives us, we thank the Lord of Hosts and His friend the Prophet, the latter of whom instituted here on earth a life of loveliness without envy or jealousy... We shall not give up this our life of loveliness, as long as we live, however much we are oppressed by the Government and its troops and policemen, its Congress and Senate, orators, newspaper scribes and authors, professors and paltry bishops, and even the antichrist himself, the Pope. No power on earth will succeed in preventing us from accomplishing God's sacred ordinances, as regards polygamy no less than all the other aspects that God has revealed to us. Polygamy as long as we live, say we women of Latter-Day Saints; polygamy or death!

Halldór Laxness
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.

Halldór Laxness
Oh no, better to be silent. That is what the glacier does. That is what the lilies of the field do.

Halldór Laxness