Halldór Laxness Quotes

169 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Halldór Laxness
Whoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.

Halldór Laxness
Other children had fathers and mothers and honored them, and they prospered and lived to a ripe old age; but he was often bitter towards his father and mother and dishonored them in his heart. His mother had cuckolded his father, and his father had betrayed his mother, and both of them had betrayed the boy. The only consolation was that he had a Father in heaven. And yet—it would have been better to have a father on earth.

Halldór Laxness
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
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.

Halldór Laxness
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.

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

Halldór Laxness
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
Many a man may have his doubts for the moment, but when all comes to all and a long view is taken, one discovers usually that things have been making some sort of forward progress, some headway or other. And a man's dreams have a habit of coming true, more especially if he has made no particular effort to fulfill them... It is particularly supposed that when a man has made himself worthy of living in a real house, he will be given a real house to live in; it sprouts out of the earth for him of its own accord, they say; life bestows on the individual all that he is worthy of, and the same is said to be true of the nation as a whole.

Halldór Laxness
I was hoping the bishop would be coming himself. He's a terribly agreeable old chap. I always find it so enjoyable to blether with the old fellow. We don't agree about anything. But everything depends on agreeing to disagree.

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

Halldór Laxness
The tyranny of mankind; it was like the obstinate drip of water falling on a stone and hollowing it little by little; and this drip continued, falling obstinately, falling without pause on the souls of the children.

Halldór Laxness
One boy's footprints are not long in being lost in the snow, in the steadily falling snow of the shortest day, the longest night; they are lost as soon as they are made. And once again the heath is clothed in drifting white. And there is no ghost, save the one ghost that lives in the heart of a motherless boy, till his footprints disappear.

Halldór Laxness
In early times, say the Icelandic chronicles, men from the Western Islands came to live in this country, and when they departed, left behind them crosses, bells, and other objects used in the practice of sorcery... In those days there was great fertility of the soil in Iceland. But when the Norsemen came to settle here, the Western sorcerers were forced to flee the land, and old writings say that Kolumkilli, determined on revenge, laid a curse on the invaders, swearing that they would never prosper here, and more in the same spirit, much of what has since, to all appearances, been fulfilled.

Halldór Laxness
Over verdant lowlands cut by the deep streamwaters of the south hangs a peculiar gloom. Every eye is stifled by the clouds that block the sight of the sun, every voice is muffled like the chirps of fleeing birds, every quasi-movement sluggish. Children must not laugh, no attention must be drawn to the fact that a man exists, one must not provoke the powers with frivolity—do nothing but prowl along, furtively, lowly. Maybe the Godhead had not yet struck its final blow, an unexpiated sin might still fester somewhere, perhaps there still lurked worms that needed to be crushed.

Halldór Laxness
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.

Halldór Laxness