Quotes by Halldór Laxness

“Remember, any lie you are told, even deliberately, is often a more significant fact than a truth told in all sincerity.”

“Eins var algengt hjá okkur ef spurt var um líðan einhvers manns: iss hann er feitur; en það þýddi að honum liði vel, eða einsog sagt mundi vera í Danmörku, að hann væri hamingjusamur. Ef einhverjum...”

“The distinctive features of the world's civilisations are not simply and solely the giraffe and the city of Rome, as the children may perhaps have been led to imagine on the first evening, but also...”

“...freedom is of more account than the height of a roof beam. I ought to know; mine cost me eighteen years' slavery. The man who lives on his own land is an independent man. He is his own master. I...”

“Immoral women do not exist", said the organist. "That this only a superstition. On the other hand there exist women who sleep thirty times with one man, and women who sleep once with thirty men.”

“What does hanging on a cross for twenty-four hours mean to a man who has no children,' I said, 'especially when he knows he's dying for a good cause -- indeed, that he's saving the whole world and ...”

“Life in Oseyri was lived in fish and consisted of fish, and human beings were a sort of abortion which Our Lord had made out of cooked fish and perhaps a handful of rotten potatoes and a drop of oa...”

“Remember that every day you quicken into motion waves that undulate on to the very confines of existence; you stir up waves that break upon the shores of eternity itself. And it is of much importan...”

“Can't we make a blusterer ourselves? asked Jón Hreggviðsson. Can't we scratch that damned sign with the ax-point onto the chopping block and get a beautiful, chubby woman in here tonight, right now...”

“When a man has a flower in his life he builds a house.”

“He disliked tears, he has always disliked tears, had never understood them, and sometimes lost his temper over them; but he felt now that he could not rebuke this flower of his life, this innocent ...”

“For once the crofter was at a a rather loss for words, for to him nothing has ever been more completely unintelligible than the reasoning that is bred of tears.”

“I know perfectly well that it is impossible, according to arithmetic and scholarly books, to live in a far valley off a handful of ewes and two low yield cows. But we live, I say. You children all ...”

“Human beings, in point of fact, are lonely by nature, and one should feel sorry for them and love them and mourn with them. It is certain that people would understand one another better and love on...”

“Often I felt that these men were play-acting: the unreality of their role was their security, even their own destinies were to them saga and folk-tale rather than a private matter; these were men u...”

“Man is more perfect than god. Although this woman's doctrine, in which she was brought up from childhood, told her than all men were lost sinners, I have never heard her censure a man with so much ...”

“Oh yes", said the old woman, "but I've heard these so-called stoves are by no means all they are supposed to be. I never saw a stove in my day, and yet never ailed a thing, at least as long as I co...”

“Asta Sollilja slept on, her head in the corner, mouth open, chin up, and head back, with one hand under her ear and the other half-open on the coverlet as if she thought in her sleep that someone w...”

“That blasted family could never look at a living thing without wanting to make a profit out of it, preferably by killing it.”

“My opinion has always been this. That you ought never to give up as long as you live, even though they have stolen everything from you. If nothing else, you can always call the air you breath your ...”