Best Norse Quotes & Sayings

I don't understand a word you're saying," snapped Odin.
"That's because you're throttlin' me, sir," said Sugar.
Odin loosened his grip. — Joanne Harris

There are three known planets in the PSR B1257 system, which have been named Draugr, Poltergeist and Phobetor. Poltergeist was the first to be discovered. I know, I was curious about their names as well. Poletrgeist means "pounding ghost". The draugr are the unded in Norse legends who live in their graves. And Phobetor is the personification of nightmares, and the son of Nyx, Greek goddess of the night.
Astronomers are goths. — Brian Cox

That's it? That's all that happens after you topple from grace? We lose our rubies and rations?" Marshall smirked. "Woe is me. — Sophie Avett

brain was sticky, phrases and snatches of songs were always wedging themselves in there. Annihilation. He saw flashes of Norse barbarians swinging axes. He wondered for a second, only a second, if he'd been reincarnated, and this was some leftover memory, flittering down like ash. Then he picked up his bike and banished the idea. He wasn't ten. — Gillian Flynn

Language and History in Viking Age England: Language Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English (Turnbout, 2002). — F. Donald Logan

In our household, the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology — Barack Obama

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

He went crazy over Greek mythology, which is where I got my name.

They compromised on it, because my mom loved Shakespeare, and I ended up called Theseus Cassio. Theseus for the slayer of the Minotaur, and Cassio for Othello's doomed lieutenant. I think it sounds straight-up stupid. Theseus Cassio Lowood. Everyone just calls me Cas. I suppose I should be glad--my dad also loved Norse mythology, so I might have wound up being called Thor, which would have been basically unbearable. — Kendare Blake

In the ninth and tenth centuries the Vikings invaded Britain from Scandinavia and settled in large numbers. Their language, which we call Old Norse, was at least partly comprehensible to the English, who did not hesitate to take over hundreds of words from it: skirt, window, scrub, sky, give, hit, kick, scatter, scrape, skill, scowl, score, fellow, want, skin, knife, law, happy, ugly, wrong and even the pronouns they and them. — Larry Trask

The Norse myths are the myths of a chilly place, with long, long winter nights and endless summer days, myths of a people who did not entirely trust or even like their gods, although they respected and feared them. — Neil Gaiman

Yo!" I caught the sleeve of his cashmere coat. "Rewind to the part about a Norse god being my pappy. — Rick Riordan

Lif and Lifthrasir will have children. Their children will have children.
There will be life and new life, life everywhere on earth. That was the end; and this is the beginning. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

Danes, Norse... all were from the northlands in the eyes of her people. To their fright-frozen minds, Hakan was another of the dreaded Norse, sweeping over the land like a plague and leaving little in the wake. But summer had yielded a different crop for her: not all Norse were vicious raiders out for death and plunder.
Hakan braced one foot on a rock. "And now the Norse wolf brings you safely home."...
"Aye," she said. — Gina Conkle

In another chapter I have told you how in the year 800 a German chieftain had become a Roman Emperor. Now in the year 1066 the grandson of a Norse pirate was recognised as King of England. Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth of history is so much more interesting and entertaining? — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories. The black was now in the thin child's head and was part of the way she took in every new thing she encountered. — A.S. Byatt

Because," said Thor, "When something goes wrong, the first thing I think is, it is Loki's fault. It saves a lot of time. — Neil Gaiman

When we kill our desires we stink like any corpse. — Harold Norse

If you look at the great Westerns, and at Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology, they all contain elements in common: a harsh landscape; demons or outlaws trying to stop or kill the protagonist; and there are mythical legends at their core, innate in all cultures. — Simon Toyne

Fantasy is my favorite genre for reading and writing. We have more options than anyone else, and the best props and special effects. That means if you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. — Patrick Rothfuss

Now he understood what it was to be a man: that it was to be weak as well as strong, to be foolish sometimes and wise sometimes, to know love as well as to kill. And he had learned that there were other paths for him, other gods who called in the deep places of the earth, in the lap of wavelets on the shore, in the breath of the wind. He had learned that there were other kinds of courage. He knew, with deep certainty, that the islands held a new path for him. He need only move forward and find it. — Juliet Marillier

On my life, Magnus, I swear this is the truth: your father is a Norse god. Now, hurry. We're in a twenty- minute parking spot. — Rick Riordan

My novel 'Wolf Brother' is set in northern Scandinavia during the late Stone Age, so I was aware from the start of Norse influences. I used some Norse names, and the soul-eater Thiazzi is based on the Norse storm giant, Thiassi. — Michelle Paver

It always has been and always will be the same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible gift as did the German Minnesingers long before them and the old Norse Saga writers long before that. And for the same thing sighed the early prophets and the philosophers of ancient Greece. From all accounts, the world has been getting worse and worse ever since it was created. All I can say is that it must have been a remarkably delightful place when it was first opened to the public, for it is very pleasant even now if you only keep as much as possible in the sunshine and take the rain good-temperedly. — Jerome K. Jerome

I have always been interested in mythology and history. The more I read, the more I realized that there have always been people at the edges of history that we know very little about. I wanted to use them in a story and bring them back into the public's consciousness. Similarly with mythology: everyone knows some of the Greek or Roman legends, and maybe some of the Egyptian or Norse stories too, but what about the other great mythologies: the Celtic, Chinese, Native American? — Michael Scott

If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be. — Patrick Rothfuss

The three sons of Bor had no liking for Ymir ... At last they attacked Ymir and killed him. His wounds were like springs; so much blood streamed from them and so fast, that the flood drowned all the frost giants except Bergelmir and his wife. They embarked in their boat and rode out on a tide of gore — Kevin Crossley-Holland

Mercury. Lead. Antimony. A cresent moon sits at the nape of her neck; and Egyptian ankh near her collarbone. There are other symbols as well: Norse runes, Chinese characters.
It is part of who I was, who I am, and who I will be. — Erin Morgenstern

Moderately wise each one should be, Not overwise, for a wise man's heart Is seldom glad (Norse Wisdom) — Edith Hamilton

When the all-father in eagle form had almost reached the vats, with Suttung immediately behind him, Odin blew some of the mead out of his behind, a splattery wet fart of foul-smelling mead right in Suttung's face, blinding the giant and throwing him off Odin's trail.
No one, then or now, wanted to drink the mead that came out of Odin's ass. — Neil Gaiman

Among the old Norse, it was the custom for certain warriors to dress in the skins of the beasts they had slain, and thus to give themselves an air of ferocity, calculated to strike terror into the hearts of their foes. — Sabine Baring-Gould

The subliterary fiction she was churning out was many decades away from being in any way respectable. There was a small group that confessed to reading The Lord of the Rings, though you had to justify it through an interest in Old Norse. — Margaret Atwood

Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, "without brother behind it;" and this is, by analogy, true of an elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler in any critical emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible resources of prestige, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent interest, while the new man must slowly and painfully create all these out of the unwilling material around him, by superiority of character, by patient singleness of purpose, by sagacious presentiment of popular tendencies and instinctive sympathy with the national character. Mr. Lincoln's task was one of peculiar and exceptional difficulty. — James Russell Lowell