Halldór Laxness Quotes

It may well be that fighting is normal, like having something to eat. Peace, on the other hand, is a luxury.

Icelanders! You are the descendants of Nordic vikings! Down with Irish slaves!

It's you who are strange. Talking to you is like talking to someone who has no shadow.

To be a poet is to be a visitor on a distant shore until one dies. In the land where I belong, but which I shall never reach, individuals have no cares, and that is because industry runs by itself without anyone trying to steal from others. My land is a land of plenty; it is the world that Nature has given to mankind, where society is not a thieves' society, where the children aren't sickly but healthy and contented, and young men and women can fulfill their aspirations because it is natural to do so. In my world it is possible to fulfill all aspirations, and therefore all aspirations are in themselves good, quite unlike here, where people's aspirations are called wicked because it isn't possible to fulfill them.

The Voice began to echo at once. It was the same Voice of old. The difference was that when he was a child he thought he knew what it was, and that he understood it, and he gave it a name; but the older and wiser he became, the more difficult he found it to say what it was, or to understand it, except that he felt it called him away from other people and the responsibilities of life to the place where it alone reigned . . . Ah, sweet Voice, he said, and filled his lungs with the cool evening breeze of the north, but he did not dare open his arms to it for fear that people might think he was mad.

Work on the one side, the home on the other—they were two walls in the one prison.

The worth of any deed depends on how it is assessed by the onlookers . . . once you have made yourself look ridiculous, you go on being ridiculous whatever you do, perhaps for the rest of your life.

Hauling fish from the sea—what endless toil. One could almost say, what an eternal problem.

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.

This summer which was now passing—never had anyone lived such a summer! Nature had given him the happiness of a blossom. She gave him love and a palace, and put precious poetry into his mouth; it was all one long, unbroken romance. And now everything was lost, his poems, his love and his palace, withered, burnt; forlorn and helpless, he faced the desolation of winter.

I didn't expect you to have learnt to smile yet. When one is born, one only knows how to cry. It's only very gradually that one learns to smile.

How is one to have any respect for the world where nothing else matters except who can lie the most plausibly and steal the most?

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.

Jesus! My brother! Heave-up!

There's no creature on earth so despicable and loathsome as a rich man with a conscience.