Halldór Laxness Quotes

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.

They were allowed a little touch at each of the books, but only with their fingertips tonight, literature cannot bear dirty hands; first we'll have to back each volume with paper, the covers must not get dirty, nor the spines slit, books are the nation's most precious possession, books have preserved the nation's life through monopoly, pestilence, and volcanic eruption, not to mention the tons of snow that have lain over the country's widely scattered homesteads for the major part of every one of its thousand years.

[T]o anyone who weeps, life has some importance.

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

But whoever thinks that beauty is something he can enjoy exclusively for himself just by abandoning other people and closing his eyes to the human life of which he is part—he is not the friend of beauty. He ends up either as Pétur Þríhross's poet, or his secretary. He who doesn't fight every day of his life to the last breath against the representatives of evil, against the living images of evil who rule Sviðinsvík—he blasphemes by taking the word beauty into his mouth.

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

When I was in Bessastaðir I had a jug of water—and an ax. A well-sharpened ax is a fine tool. On the other hand I've never been fond of the gallows, and never less than when I wrestled a hanged man.

Philosophy and theology have no effect on him, much less plain common sense. Impossible to convince this man by arguments. But humor he always listens to, even though it be ill humor. A typical Icelander, perhaps.

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

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.

Thereafter, when he himself was dead, he imagined that his poems would be published in some mysterious way, and the nation would read them for comfort in adversity, as it had read the poems of other poets before him; it was his highest wish that his poems could help those as unfortunate as himself to have patience to endure.

When someone from Skagafjörður was settled comfortably against our gable-wall and was launched on to the Úlfar-rímur set to a Skagafjörður chant, with that obligatory opening about King Cyrus, there opened up before us a whole wide world of heroic poetry all the way to the Orient, fitfully lit by strange flashes of illumination.

Three things, according to poets, are considered bliss in Iceland: hot rye-cakes, plump girls, and cold buttermilk.

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

Curiosity can be called a virtue or a vice, depending on what kind of elementary ethics one reads; in our house at Brekkukot, curiosity was considered on a par with thievishness.