Frasi di Halldór Kiljan Laxness pagina 4

“La guerra è sempre stata il principale divertimento dell'umanità. Gli altri divertimenti sono un surrogato della guerra.”

da Kristnihald undir Jökli

“La storia è sempre differente da quello che è capitato.”

da Kristnihald undir Jökli

“Fin da quando avevo imparato a leggere, mi avevano sempre infastidito le storie che contenevano un insegnamento morale, un tentativo educativo o comunque un secondo significato celato dietro avvincenti prolusioni o sotto le mentite spoglie di una fiaba. Avevo sempre avuto l'impressione che questo uso improprio della parola mirasse a ingannarmi, e d'istinto smettevo di leggere o di ascoltare non appena cominciavo a sospettare che la narrazione avesse lo scopo d'instillarmi una saggezza che qualcun altro riteneva importante, una virtù che a qualcun altro sembrava bella - invece di raccontarmi una storia, dato che le storie sono la cosa più splendida che si possa raccontare.”

da Kristnihald undir Jökli

“Ecco che cosa intendo per esperienze paranormali, soprannaturali. Se l'umanità si accontentasse di quelle, come faceva una volta, non avrebbe bisogno del tabacco e dell'acquavite.”

Sette maghi

“Che creatura ripugnante, l'uomo", commentò.
"Perché?" chiesi.
"Beve il latte di altri animali", spiegò. "In effetti è l'apice del contronatura. Quando mai a un cavallo viene in mente di farsi allattare da una vacca?”

Sette maghi

“Sell the country, bury bones. What else?”

Sette maghi

Halldór Kiljan Laxness: Frasi in inglese

“It was not much fun being called a ghost for more than two hundred years, and each time a calf fell into a pool or a cow went dry or the roof fell in on people, it was always that damned ghost.”

Halldór Laxness libro The Atom Station

the unself-conscious policeman
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“As a matter of fact, others are ready to help. There is for instance the Weather; and there is the Law of Gravity; and last but not least, Time. These are tough fellows. Night and day, always at it. And at it still. No one is a match for them.</b”

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

“There is no such thing as morality—only varingly expedient conventions. What to one race is a crime, is virtue to another; crime in one era is virtue in another; even a crime in one class of society is at the same time and in the same society virtue in another class... It makes no difference whether people are called good or bad; we are all here; now; there is only one world in existence, and in it there prevail either expedient or inexpedient conditions for those who are alive.”

Halldór Laxness libro Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

“This summer which was now passing—never had anyone lived such a summer! Nature had given him the happiness of a blossom. She gave him love and a palace, and put precious poetry into his mouth; it was all one long, unbroken romance. And now everything was lost, his poems, his love and his palace, withered, burnt; forlorn and helpless, he faced the desolation of winter.”

Halldór Laxness libro The Atom Station

the organist
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“They walked together like that all night, and there was no night, just a slight unreality, a momentary trance, with mist here and there as if the landscape were about to dissolve, and then nothing dissolved and the mist had vanished again. There was a crimson glow on the highest mountain ridges, and shining birds swarming in their thousands over the flame-gilded, mirror-smooth sea. And they went on talking together. Ólafur Kárason had no perception of the passing of time; only that voice with its dark, silk-edged, golden tones reverberated through his consciousness. When a man has lost what he loves most, there is no need to write poetry; the timber of a man's voice expresses all the poetry of life.”

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

“I do not see how the Creation can be turned into words, let alone letters, hardly even a fiction. History is always entirely different to what has happened. The facts are all fled from you before you start the story. History is simply a fact on its own. And the closer you try to approach the facts through history, the deeper you sink into fiction.”

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

“b>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 libro Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

“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.”

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

“Anyone who doesn't know others doesn't know himself.”

Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

“One of the first things I had been taught as a child was never to believe a single word that was written in newspapers.”

Borgi
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

“Pray God for guidance, man. It's thirty-odd years since I sold the last copy of Orvar-Odds saga. The country stands on an entirely different cultural footing nowadays. I can recommend the story of King Solomon's Mines there, all about the hero of Umslopogaas, in his own way a great man, and in my opinion no whit inferior to Orvar-Oddur.”

Halldór Laxness libro The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“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.”

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book One, Part II: Free of Debt

“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.</b”

Örn Úlfar
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

“It's a pity we don't whistle at one another, like birds. Words are misleading.”

Halldór Laxness libro The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“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 libro Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Pastor Jón Prímus
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

“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.</b”

Örn Úlfar
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

“He who weeps does not die; weeping is a sign of life; weep, and your life is worth something again.”

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Four: The Beauty of the Heavens

“When's there ever been a decent saint who didn't start out as a thief?”

Halldór Laxness libro The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“After Bjartur had become a person of great worth, even he was prone to admit on occasion that life had sometimes been pretty hard in Summerhouses in the old days, but one has to take a few knocks if one wants to get on, surely, and anyway we never ate other folk's bread. Other folk's bread is the most virulent form of poison that a free and independent man can take; other folk's bread is the only thing that can rob him of independence and the one true freedom.”

Jón Hreggviðsson
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part III: Fire in Copenhagen

“How is one to have any respect for the world where nothing else matters except who can lie the most plausibly and steal the most?”

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book Two, Part II: Years of Prosperity

“No one is so busy that he hasn't the time to dismantle a work of art.”

Þórunn of Kambar
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

“Of all the creatures that man kills for his amusement there is only one that he kills out of hatred—other men. Man hates nothing as much as himself. That is why war is called the leprosy of the human soul.”

Halldór Laxness libro Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Pastor Jón Prímus
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

“My children have never brought any shame upon their father. They have been independent children, my children.”

Halldór Laxness libro Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Saknússemm II
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

“When they were busy molding the upper floor, it was discovered that the cellar had begun to crack. When the foreman joiner and the foreman mason were summoned, they announced that these cracks must have been caused by the earthquakes that had occurred that summer. Bjartur said that no one had noticed any earthquakes that particular summer, not on the upper surface of the earth at least. "There were earthquakes in Korea," said the foreman joiner.”

Bjartur
Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book Two, Part II: Years of Prosperity

“Good news travels slowly but arrives in the end, thank goodness. Bad news always arrives a day too soon.”

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book Two, Part II: Years of Prosperity

“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.”

Steinar's wife
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

“Was this perhaps life, then?—to have loved one summer in youth and not to have been aware of it until it was over, some sea-wet footprints on the floor and sand in the prints, the fragrance of a woman, soft loving lips in the dusk of a summer night, sea birds; and then nothing more; gone.”

Einar in "Shepherds' Meet"
Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book One, Part I: Icelandic Pioneers

“How much can one sacrifice for the sake of one's pride? Everything, of course—if one is proud enough.”

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

“The mountain reminds one of an upturned earthenware bowl, the glazing a little bluish at times, but sometimes like gold-rimmed transparent Chinese porcelain, especially if the sun is low in the west over the sea, because then the rays play on the glacier in two directions.”

Halldór Laxness libro The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)