When my grandfather was born there were barely two thousand people living in the capital; in my own childhood there were nearly five thousand. In grandfather's childhood the only people who counted were a few government officials and a few foreign merchants, mainly Jews from Schleswig and Holstein who spoke Low German and called themselves Danes . . . The rest of the town's inhabitants were cottagers who went out to the fishing and sometimes owned a small share in a cow, or had a few sheep. They had little rowing-boats, on which they could sometimes hoist a sail.
Halldor Laxness
» Halldor Laxness - all quotes »
"My first musical memory? It’s probably my grandfather sticking headphones on my head. He had a music room that was huge. He probably had two or three thousand records, you know what I mean, vinyl. My grandfather was a music buff, and I credit my affinity towards music to him. But I remember him sticking on the song 'Popcorn'. It’s a record called 'Popcorn', and it’s this quirky little disco melody that is stuck in my head to this day."
Klayton
"Only three people," said Palmerston, "have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business—the Prince Consort, who is dead—a German professor, who has gone mad—and I, who have forgotten all about it."
Henry Temple
Grandfather, when you saw the tiger were you scared? Bad people scare me, not tigers.
Grandfather, have you ever run into bad people?
There aren’t many tigers but lots of bad people, only you can’t shoot people.Gao Xingjian
I had a happy, idyllic, old-fashioned childhood. Go to the town where I spent that childhood, you will not find my happy hours there. Yet they remain definite constituents of a divine reality about which true statements can still be made. My happy childhood was a gift my parents and the world offered to God.
Charles Hartshorne
From that point, my universe went on crumbling; new cracks appeared all the time. I could see that the pleasant securities of childhood, all of those warm little human emotions, all of those trivial aims and purposes that we allow to rule our lives, were an illusion. We were like sheep munching grass, unaware that the butcher's lorry is already on its way. I got used to living with a deep, underlying feeling of uncertainty that no one around me seemed to share. It was rather like living on death row.
Colin Wilson
Laxness, Halldor
Layard, Austen Henry
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