Skip to content

Quotes from Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) — Halldór Laxness

1902–1998 Iceland

← All quotes by Halldór Laxness

9 quotes

I say, and have always said, and will always say: the fish that does not sing throughout the whole world is a dead fish.

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Some voices never manage to break properly. But in all good men there lurks a true note, I won't say like a mouse in a trap, but rather like a mouse between wall and wainscoting.

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Learn never to look forward to anything. It is the beginning of knowing how to endure everything.

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

It is anything but easy trying to speak of a person one knows so little about but who is nevertheless so close to me.

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

My mother once sent me out to buy pepper, and I have not returned home yet.

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Curiosity can be called a virtue or a vice, depending on what kind of elementary ethics one reads; in our house at Brekkukot, curiosity was considered on a par with thievishness.

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

People have kept on asking me: did he sing well? I reply, the world is a song, but we do not know whether it is a good song because we have nothing to compare it with.

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

If you’re fond of someone, you don’t care even if he doesn’t live in a palace and even if all the banks where he has deposits and all the worldcities where he is famous don’t exist.

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

I hope that famous critics will not class me with certain devotees of death and doom if I say here that I think that funerals in our churchyard gave me more entertainment than most other things when I was a little boy.

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Halldór Laxness (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.