Halldor Laxness (1902 – 1998)
Born Halldór Gu?jónsson, was a 20th century Icelandic author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955.
In the end one is no longer sure which is the greatest evildoer, the man who gets up early or the man who goes to bed late.
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).
People who like to display complicated technique in their verse are more given to pride themselves on their work than are those who write for their own solace.
The correct understanding of life, let me tell you, is love despite everything. Love despite everything, that is the aim and object of life. Love, you see, is the only thing that pays in the long run, even though it might seem a dead loss in the short run.
Suicide—masturbation multiplied by itself!
My job was to keep the house clean, get the children off to school, help the cook-housekeeper, and serve at table. The house was much more perfect than the sort of gilt-bordered Christmas-card-Heaven that a crooked-nosed woman would sacrifice everything to attain in the next world: it was an all-electric house, with machines being plugged in and started up all day long; there was no such thing as a fire; heat came from hot-springs underground, and the glowing embers in the fireplace were made of glass.
A long time ago they brought me here eastward over the heath, along with one Jón ?eófílusson from the Westfjörds, who was burned after the devil testified against him. And I've got one thing to say about that: a ladies' man like him, who could sit up in the gables an entire night holding on to a Blusterer while his girl was in bed with another man, didn't deserve any better, and that's why I told him so many times in the black pit, 'You'll definitely be burned.'
No one is so busy that he hasn't the time to dismantle a work of art.
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.
There was a time, it says in books, that the Icelandic people had only one national treasure: a bell . . . When the king decreed that the people of Iceland were to relinquish all of their brass and copper so that Copenhagen could be rebuilt following the war, men were sent to fetch the ancient bell at ?ingvellir by Öxará.
Hauling fish from the sea—what endless toil. One could almost say, what an eternal problem.
It may well be that fighting is normal, like having something to eat. Peace, on the other hand, is a luxury.
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.
It's a useful habit to never believe more than half of what people tell you, and not to concern yourself with the rest. Rather keep your mind free and your path your own.
Since when has America with all its hordes of gangsters and beggars become God's Kingdom?
I stood in the middle of the room and began to study the pictures in the house. I had often looked at these ten- or even twenty-centimeter mountains which seemed to have been made sometimes of porridge, sometimes of bluish sago pudding, sometimes a mash of curds—sometimes even like an upturned bowl with Eiriks Glacier underneath; and I had never been able to understand where I was meant to be placed, because anyone who comes from the north and has lived opposite a mountain cannot understand a mountain in a picture in the south.
It's an honor to be beheaded. Even a little churl becomes a man by being beheaded.
My children have never brought any shame upon their father. They have been independent children, my children.
I have no idea whether my grandfather took notice of everything in it, or nothing. If he believed at all, he was just like those theologians who store their theology somewhere in a locked compartment of the brain, or rather, perhaps, like those travelers who carry a bottle of iodine in their luggage and take care to keep it tightly corked in case it leaks and ruins their belongings. To be honest, I think my grandfather Björn of Brekkukot would not have been significantly different if he had lived here in Iceland in pagan times, or if his home had been somewhere in the world where people never read from Vídalín's Book of Sermons but believed instead in the bull Apis, or the god Ra, or the bird Colibri . . . . "A Bible that costs half a hen? Pshaw!"
A topic that sometimes succeeds in being fully resolved with the help of long explanations in speech or writing, with arguments and letter, but more often fails the harder it is pursued, can be resolved by dumbness in a single hour.