72 Quotes by Halldór Laxness

Sin - sin is God’s most precious gift.

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.

Strange though it may seem, people rarely show such enthusiasm as when they are seeking the proof of a ghost story—the soul gathers all this sort of thing to its hungry bosom.

...nothing is true that cannot be proven--and therefore, it's not true.

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 own, or at any rate you can claim that you have it on loan. Yes, lass, last night I ate stolen bread and left my son among men who are going to use pick-handles on the authorities, so I thought I might as well look you up this morning.

People don't have the imagination to understand politicians. People are too innocent

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 would come and lay happiness in her palm.

And after having seen the pale necromancers who in that room with its many forgeries of Nature had talked long windedly about mildewed bones to him who dwells inaccessible in the mountain tops, that fairy person deepest in our breasts, I was refreshed and comforted by the memory of this rugged image of my origin.