Halldór Laxness Quotes

Anyone who doesn't know others doesn't know himself.

'This is the place' is what the divinely-inspired leader is reported to have said when Salt Lake Valley opened out before the slavering oxen with blood on their hooves and the men who had managed to cross the wilderness even though their children and sweethearts still tarried in the sand. Sometimes I have the feeling that I am dead and have come to the land of eternity. Of such a land it says in a hymn I once knew, that there stood a wondrous palace on pillars, inlaid with gold and brighter than the sun . . . When I now look back across the ocean to the land whence I came, I glimpse behind me a sparse and barren coast . . . There stands my family, and looks sorrowing out to sea.

The faithful say that with such a mouth did God speak to the Church Fathers. The acoustics are so remarkable that if the name of the Lord is whispered at the altar it can be heard as a shout at the door.

Good news travels slowly but arrives in the end, thank goodness. Bad news always arrives a day too soon.

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

My name is Steinar Steinsson, from Hlíðar in Steinahlíðar. I bid the king welcome to Iceland. We are of the same kin, according to the genealogy which Bjarni Guðmundsson of Fuglavík prepared for my grandfather. I am of Jutland origin, descended from King Harald Hilditönn, who fought the battle of Brávellir.

Since when has America with all its hordes of gangsters and beggars become God's Kingdom?

A good pony can occur on a farm once in a generation, with luck; but on some farms, never in a thousand years. From the sea, beyond the sands and marshes, for a thousand years, the murmur was always the same.

At this time, Icelanders were said to be the poorest people in Europe, just as their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had been, all the way back to the earliest settlers; but they believed that many long centuries ago there had been a Golden Age in Iceland, when Icelanders had not been mere farmers and fisherman as they were now, but royal-born heroes and poets who owned weapons, gold, and ships.

Slow good luck is best.

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.

If you’re fond of someone, you don’t care even if he doesn’t live in a palace and even if all the banks where he has deposits and all the worldcities where he is famous don’t exist.

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.

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

One night you discover to your great surprise that you have not spent all your money that day,” he said. “Next morning you wake up early and go out and buy yourself a hat – and when you have got the hat you realize that you now have even more money in your pocket. You invite a friend, two or three of them perhaps, to come with you to a restaurant, and you eat your fill of all the best food and wines available there. When you simply can’t force down another bite and you leave the restaurant, you discover that you’ve made yet another haul while you were sitting inside. You become flurried and go and buy a house with a garden to try to rid yourself of this trash, but no sooner have you paid for the house cash down than you notice that your money has multiplied through the purchase. Now you are seized with a kind of frenzy that Björn of Brekkukot would never understand, far less your grandmother. You set off travelling round and round the world, pouring out money with both hands to other demented vagrants wherever you go, and you don’t even dare to open your letters because you know that they will all say the same thing: your deposits at I don’t know how many banks all over the world are still growing with ever increasing speed.