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Three things, according to poets, are considered bliss in Iceland: hot rye-cakes, plump girls, and cold buttermilk.

— Halldór Laxness Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

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Poetry

More quotes by Halldór Laxness

Yes, it is a painful lot to be a poet and to love both God and man by the farthest northern seas!

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)

Flowers are immortal. You cut them in autumn and they grow again in spring—somewhere.

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Although grace comes from above, that is not to say that everyone has the ability to accept to it.

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)

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

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

It's an old saying that one still has to know something, despite everything.

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

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Halldór Laxness (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.