Top 15 Halldór Laxness Quotes

There is no other Úa than the one who has always lived with me and never gone from me for a single moment. She is closer to me than the flower of the field and the light of the glacier, because she is fused with my own breath. The one thing that remains is what lives deepest within yourself, even though you glide from one galaxy to another. Nothing can change that. And now let us have more shark meat.

Human beings are constantly inventing new ways of maltreating one other. C'est la vie.

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

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.

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.

And when I say the world is governed by nothing but demons, who will continue to be demons until they have destroyed the world, I am not using profanities; on the contrary, demon is a scientific term, a formula covering a specific chemical composition without connotations from politics, religion, or moral philosophy . . . . Here among us on the lowest rung of the world of life, no attention is paid to books unless they are written by chemically analyzed demons, or at least for them. Poets and philosophers are respected in proportion to the contempt and disgust they feel for the creation of life. Give this day our daily war is the prayer of those who govern countries. Kill, kill, said the outlaw Skuggasveinn . . .

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.

Often I think the Almighty is like a snow bunting abandoned in all weathers. Such a bird is about the weight of a postage stamp. Yet he does not blow away when he stands in the open in a tempest . . . He wields this fragile head against the gale, with his beak to the ground, wings folded close to his sides and his tail pointing upwards; and the wind can get no hold on him, and cleaves.

It's an old saying that one still has to know something, despite everything.

The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it; the historian tells lies in his simplicity and imagines he is telling the truth.

I do not see how the Creation can be turned into words, let alone letters, hardly even a fiction. History is always entirely different to what has happened. The facts are all fled from you before you start the story. History is simply a fact on its own. And the closer you try to approach the facts through history, the deeper you sink into fiction.

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

When I discovered that history is a fable, and a poor one at that, I started looking for a better fable, and found theology.

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.

No one is so busy that he hasn't the time to dismantle a work of art.