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Halldór Laxness quotes - page 3
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.
Halldór Laxness
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.
Halldór Laxness
Do you know that these mountains you're looking at don't really exist at all? Or can't you see that they belong more to the sky than the earth? All this enchanting blueness which enthralls you is an illusion.
Halldór Laxness
"The poet felt completely free now as he stood there on the deck in his collar and boots, sailing past new and ever newer districts; even if he did not own this land's resources, he owned its beauty.
Halldór Laxness
How much can one sacrifice for the sake of one's pride? Everything, of course-if one is proud enough.
Halldór Laxness
Oh no, better to be silent. That is what the glacier does. That is what the lilies of the field do.
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
Over verdant lowlands cut by the deep streamwaters of the south hangs a peculiar gloom. Every eye is stifled by the clouds that block the sight of the sun, every voice is muffled like the chirps of fleeing birds, every quasi-movement sluggish. Children must not laugh, no attention must be drawn to the fact that a man exists, one must not provoke the powers with frivolity-do nothing but prowl along, furtively, lowly. Maybe the Godhead had not yet struck its final blow, an unexpiated sin might still fester somewhere, perhaps there still lurked worms that needed to be crushed.
Halldór Laxness
So hopelessly incapable was I of understanding better folk that I did not even know how to keep a servile tongue in my head. In a flash there appeared before my mind the difference between the two worlds in which we lived, this woman and I; although I was staying under her roof we were such poles apart from one another that it was only with half justification possible to classify us together as human beings; we were both vertebrates, certainly, even mammals, but there all resemblance ended; any human society of which both of us were members was merely an empty phrase.
Halldór Laxness
It is justice, not love, that will one day give life to the children of the future. The battle for justice is the one thing which gives human life rational meaning.
Halldór Laxness
If there's one thing I despise, it's brennivín . . . [T]here no longer exists within me a single spark of longing for brennivín.
Halldór Laxness
I've never known justice to be used for anything other than the taking of poor men's lives. That's why I'm begging you, since you know how to speak to great men, to protect Jón Hreggviðson from justice.
Halldór Laxness
"After further consideration, the herd of ponies had left off being frightened at all and had calmed down, and were now grazing in the home pastures, on the grass fields and gravel banks or in the home meadow close up to the farm. I stood at the window in that autumn light that makes the dead and the living more sharply discernible than the light of any other season. Yes, what a well-sculptured creature the pony is, so finely carved that even if there were no more than half a chisel stroke extra the workmanship would be ruined; that curve from neck to rump, and all the way down to the fetlock, is in actual fact a woman's curve; in the oblique-set eyes of these creatures lies buried a wisdom that is hidden from men but blended with the mockery of the idols; around the muzzle and the underlip hovers the smile that no cinema shark has ever been able to reproduce; and where is the female star who smells as wonderful as the nose of a pony?
Halldór Laxness
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
Dust, who is not dust? I am dust. But I am your Member of Parliament, nevertheless.
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
Why won't the king of Denmark leave us our names? We have done nothing against him. We deserve no less respect than he does. My forefathers were kings of land and sea . . . Our skalds composed poetry and told stories in the language of King Óðinn himself, who came from Ásgarður when Europe still spoke the language of slaves.
Halldór Laxness
When Icelanders were worthy of the name, it was considered an accepted duty to avenge with the sword the sort of crime you have committed against my family. It's a bitter thing to be living at a time when one may not challenge to single combat the man who has disgraced one's family, and carve a blood-eagle on his back!
Halldór Laxness
What made Ingolfur Arnarson a great man was first and foremost his ideals, his unquenchable love of mankind, his conviction that the people needed improved conditions of life and better facilities for cultural advancement, his determination to mitigate his fellow men's sufferings by establishing a better form of government in the country . . . Middlemen and other parasites would no longer be allowed to batten on the farming classes. Ingolfur wanted to elevate the farmer's life to a position of honor and dignity, not in word alone, but in deed.
Halldór Laxness
When my daughter wakes up on her first morning in God's City of Zion, the sun will rise over Sierra Benida and shine upon the saints: the sun of the All-Wisdom; the sun of the Beehive, the Sego-lily, and Seagull . . . My son will understand that Egill Skallagrímsson and the Norse kings live here in Spanish Fork, but that they now have the gleam of righteousness in their eyes and have become leaders in the Stake, Seventies, and High Priests.
Halldór Laxness
The love which demands nothing but beauty itself and lives in selfless worship . . . is the love that no disappointment can ever conquer, perhaps not even death itself (if that existed).
Halldór Laxness
It's you who are strange. Talking to you is like talking to someone who has no shadow.
Halldór Laxness
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