Old Icelandic Quotes

#1. My thoughts fly to the old Icelandic storytellers who created our classics, whose personalities were so bound up with the masses that their names, unlike their lives' work, have not been preserved for posterity.

Halldor Laxness

#2. When people complain of the decay of manners they have in mind not the impudent abbreviations of the crowd, but the decline in bowing and scraping and in speaking of one's employer as "the master." What the rich mean by the good manners of the poor is usually not civility, but servility.

Robert Wilson Lynd

#3. I finally reach the end. Strangely, I have no feeling of accomplishment. The only thing I feel is utter relief that I don't have to run anymore.

Haruki Murakami

#4. Only ignorance makes us put up with defeat, then instead of being exalted we are humiliated

Sunday Adelaja

#5. One of the great advantages of the study of old Norse or Icelandic literature is the insight given by it into the origin of world-wide superstitions. Norse tradition is transparent as glacier ice, and its origin is as unmistakable.

Sabine Baring-Gould

#6. The human brain cannot encompass total absence. Like infinity, it is simply not something that the organ runs to. The space someone leaves must be filled, so we dream forever of those who are no longer here. Our minds make them live again.

Anna Funder

#7. We're just going around all day like unconscious machines, and meanwhile there's all this rage and worry and uneasiness just building up and building up inside us

Wallace Shawn

#8. A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.

Erica Jong