Halldór Laxness Quotes

169 Sourced Quotes

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
Remember, any lie you are told, even deliberately, is often a more significant fact than a truth told in all sincerity.

Halldór Laxness
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.

Halldór Laxness
The raven is the bird of all the gods. It was the bird of Odin and the bird of Jesus Christ. It will also be the bird of the god Skandilán, who has yet to be born. Whomever the raven rends attains salvation.

Halldór Laxness
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.

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

Halldór Laxness
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.

Halldór Laxness
When the peace of autumn has become poetic instead of being taken for granted, the last day of the plover become a matter of personal regret, the pony become associated with the history of art and mythology, the evening ice-film on the farm stream become reminiscent of crystal, and the smoke from the chimney become a message to us from those who discovered fire—then the time has come to say goodbye... I had long begun to count the days until I could once again leave home, where I felt an alien, and go out into the alien world, where I was at home. But still I paused for a while over my thoughts of departure, and listened to the silence that had robbed the gods of sleep; and dusk sank slowly over the ponies.

Halldór Laxness
Because there are indeed women in Iceland, it will now be proven to you, you ugly wench, that there are also men in Iceland!

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

Halldór Laxness
Thank the Lord, we subsidize our own debauchery first of all before we subsidize the debauchery of others.

Halldór Laxness
Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

Halldór Laxness
As a rule, the only way that anyone could escape from the castle of Bremerholm was through a dead-end opening: namely, the grave.

Halldór Laxness
You have a faint education look about you. An educated girl never has an educated look. I cannot stand an educated look on women. It's Communism. Look at me, I passed my University entrance, but I don't show it.

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

Halldór Laxness
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.

Halldór Laxness
Isn't it funny how everyone manages to die except me?

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

Halldór Laxness
'This is the place' is what the divinely-inspired leader is reported to have said when Salt Lake Valley opened out before the slavering oxen with blood on their hooves and the men who had managed to cross the wilderness even though their children and sweethearts still tarried in the sand. Sometimes I have the feeling that I am dead and have come to the land of eternity. Of such a land it says in a hymn I once knew, that there stood a wondrous palace on pillars, inlaid with gold and brighter than the sun... When I now look back across the ocean to the land whence I came, I glimpse behind me a sparse and barren coast... There stands my family, and looks sorrowing out to sea.

Halldór Laxness
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.

Halldór Laxness
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.

Halldór Laxness
Over us human beings there hangs an awful sword of justice.

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

Halldór Laxness