Halldór Laxness - The Atom Station (1948)

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I swear—swear—swear: by everything which is and has been sacred to this nation from the beginning: Iceland shall not be sold.

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

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

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
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
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
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
In actual fact, no man is honest when sober; in actual fact, you cannot believe a single word that a sober man says. I wish I were drunk myself.

Halldór Laxness
To walk home alone at night is a disaster, in novels. Some girls confuse the state of being in love and being lonely, and think they are the former when in fact they are the latter; in love with everyone and no one, just because they are without a man.

Halldór Laxness
So hopelessly incapable was I of understanding better folk that I did not even know how to keep a servile tongue in my head. In a flash there appeared before my mind the difference between the two worlds in which we lived, this woman and I; although I was staying under her roof we were such poles apart from one another that it was only with half justification possible to classify us together as human beings; we were both vertebrates, certainly, even mammals, but there all resemblance ended; any human society of which both of us were members was merely an empty phrase.

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

Halldór Laxness
Dust, who is not dust? I am dust. But I am your Member of Parliament, nevertheless.

Halldór Laxness
To explain God would be to have no God, my little one.

Halldór Laxness
The words themselves say least of all, if in fact they say anything; what really informs us is the inflection of the voice (and no less so if it is restrained), the breathing, the heartbeat, the muscles round the mouth and eyes, the dilation and conctraction of the pupils, the strength or the weakness in the knees, as well as the chain of mysterious reactions in the nerves and the secretions from hidden glands whose names one never knows even though one has read about them in books; all that is the essence of a conversation—the words are more or less incidental.

Halldór Laxness
Dear darling Americans, Jesus let them come with the atom bomb quick.

Halldór Laxness
My job was to keep the house clean, get the children off to school, help the cook-housekeeper, and serve at table. The house was much more perfect than the sort of gilt-bordered Christmas-card-Heaven that a crooked-nosed woman would sacrifice everything to attain in the next world: it was an all-electric house, with machines being plugged in and started up all day long; there was no such thing as a fire; heat came from hot-springs underground, and the glowing embers in the fireplace were made of glass.

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

Halldór Laxness