There is nothing so merciless as humankind. How can we justify ourselves, especially to the dumb animals around us? But the first days are always the worst, and there is much comfort in the thought that time effaces everything, crime and sorrow no less then love.
Halldór Laxness, "Independent People", Vol I, Pt 2, Ch 33

No. It was neither heroes nor sacrifice nor yet virtues that she loved most, rather the poetry which spoke to her of dreams that were either fulfilled to no purpose, or never fulfilled at all; of happiness which came as a visitor or did not come, of how it came and went, or of how it never came. She saw and understood this man, not in an objective way, but in her own way: in the lambent colours of poetry, with woods in the background, and penetrating everything, the roar of the world's deepest and mightiest river.
Halldór Laxness, "Independent People", Vol II, Pt 1, Ch 49

The story of how He created the world aroused their interest immediately, even though they received no answer to the question of why He had had to do it; but they found it difficult to understand sin, or the manner of its entry into the world, for it was a complete mystery to them why the woman should have had such a passionate desire for an apple when they had no idea of the seductive properties of apples and thought they were some sort of potatoes. But less intelligible still was the flood that was caused by forty days' rain; and forty nights'. For here on the moors there were some years when it rained for two hundred days and two hundred nights, almost without fairing; but there was never any Flood. When they began to question their teacher more closely about this riddle, he replied, perhaps not without a trace of irritation: "Well, I don't vouch for it in any case."
Halldór Laxness, "Independent People", Vol II, Pt 1, Ch 50