Halldór Laxness - The Fish Can Sing (1957)

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I wonder what my grandfather Björn of Brekkukot really thought what Latin was? Did he think it was the magic Sesame which opened all cliffs in Iceland? If so, I am not at all sure that he was all that far from the truth. Where fish leaves off in Iceland, Latin takes over.

Halldór Laxness
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.

Halldór Laxness
I hope that famous critics will not class me with certain devotees of death and doom if I say here that I think that funerals in our churchyard gave me more entertainment than most other things when I was a little boy.

Halldór Laxness
You asked me whether you could learn to sing. I don't know. It could well be that you have the makings of a singer. It could well be that the world will give you the best that it has: glory, power, honor, what else is there? Palaces and parks, perhaps? Or merry meadows? And then what?

Halldór Laxness
A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father. And though I would never subscribe to such a statement wholeheartedly, I would be the last person to reject it out of hand. For my own part, I would express such a doctrine without any suggestion of bitterness against the world, or rather without the hurt which the mere sound of the words implies.

Halldór Laxness
Some voices never manage to break properly. But in all good men there lurks a true note, I won't say like a mouse in a trap, but rather like a mouse between wall and wainscoting.

Halldór Laxness
When my grandfather was born there were barely two thousand people living in the capital; in my own childhood there were nearly five thousand. In grandfather's childhood the only people who counted were a few government officials and a few foreign merchants, mainly Jews from Schleswig and Holstein who spoke Low German and called themselves Danes... The rest of the town's inhabitants were cottagers who went out to the fishing and sometimes owned a small share in a cow, or had a few sheep. They had little rowing-boats, on which they could sometimes hoist a sail.

Halldór Laxness
I say, and have always said, and will always say: the fish that does not sing throughout the whole world is a dead fish.

Halldór Laxness
I have been told that at school I was the sort of simpleton who suffered from dux-disease. It is reckoned in Iceland that those who are afflicted by this disease can never become anything other than drunkards, journalists, or junior clerks... I was spiritually as well as physically in a state of suspended adolescence. Lessons came welling up out of me as if I were talking in my sleep. I could reel off the bones in a dog at the drop of a hat, any time at all, just as if I had them in my pockets; if I had been woken up at three o'clock in the morning, I would have detailed each and every one of them, just as if I had been lying on them.

Halldór Laxness
It goes without saying that if there were anything happening in the room you never heard the clock at all, no more than if it did not exist; but when all was quiet and the visitors had gone and the table had been cleared and the door shut, then it would start up again, as steady as ever; and if you listened hard enough you could sometimes make out a singing note in its workings, or something very like an echo.

Halldór Laxness
These problems never seemed to baffle my grandfather nor cause him any anxiety; difficulties which in most people's eyes would have led to endless complications were disposed of by my grandfather almost without thinking, with the easy assurance of a sleepwalker who strolls along a ledge halfway down a hundred-foot precipice—yes, I am tempted to say with the same disregard for the laws of nature as a ghost passing through locked doors.

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

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

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
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
People have kept on asking me: did he sing well? I reply, the world is a song, but we do not know whether it is a good song because we have nothing to compare it with.

Halldór Laxness