Old Norse Quotes & Sayings

I named my album 'So Uncool' because it defies the ordinary: you're different from everyone else. It's like, being uncool makes you cool because you're different! — Keke Palmer

I'm afraid I tend to be thinking about things and not paying sufficient attention to one's posture, deportment and general cast of face. — Jeremy Paxman

The very first idea I ever had about making a film ... my first thought about ever being a filmmaker was when I was sixteen years old and I wanted to make a Viking movie. And I wanted to make it in old Norse, which I was studying at the time. It's odd because at that age that's a stupidly ridiculous idea 'cause how will I ever be a filmmaker. — Mel Gibson

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

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

And yet, it was still a performance. Odin and I both knew it. It was a kind of play, a dream of how things might have been if he and I had been capable of trusting each other for a change. And so we hunted, and sang, and laughed, and told heavily edited stories of the good old days, while each of us watched the other and wondered when the knife would fall. — Joanne Harris

The thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. — Rebecca Solnit

Since moving to Valhalla, I'd learned an impressive number of Old Norse cusswords. Meinfretr translated as something like stinkfart, which was, naturally, the worse kind of fart — Rick Riordan

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies - for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry - I say to myself, What a pity I can't buy that book, for I already have a copy at home. — Jorge Luis Borges

I like to see a billy-goat accompanying the dairy herd to pasture, supposedly to bring them luck or to eat the herbs that cause abortion. — Geoffrey Household

But in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others. — Mark Haddon

Be happy and well and forget me fast. — Elizabeth Finn

The folk of a Celtic type, whether pre-Celtic, Celtic, or Norse, have all spoken a Celtic language and exhibit the same old Celtic characteristics - vanity, loquacity, excitability, fickleness, imagination, love of the romantic, fidelity, attachment to family ties, sentimental love of their country, religiosity passing over easily to superstition, and a comparatively high degree of sexual morality. — John Arnott MacCulloch

It was not considered right for a man not to drink, although drink was a dangerous thing. On the contrary, not to drink would have been thought a mark of cowardice and of incapacity for self-control. A man was expected even to get drunk if necessary, and to keep his tongue and his temper no matter how much he drank. The strong character would only become more cautious and more silent under the influence of drink; the weak man would immediately show his weakness. I am told the curious fact that in the English army at the present day officers are expected to act very much after the teaching of the old Norse poet; a man is expected to be able on occasion to drink a considerable amount of wine or spirits without showing the effects of it, either in his conduct or in his speech. "Drink thy share of mead; speak fair or not at all" - that was the old text, and a very sensible one in its way. — Eoghan Odinsson

The Norse way of speaking, no one really knew what the Vikings sounded liked, they were Norsemen. The accent is really a combination of a Scandinavian accent, maybe with a Swedish accent and an old way of speaking. — Katheryn Winnick

Discipline is when we limit ourselves, put borders around ourselves. — Sunday Adelaja

The old witch bears many giants for sons, and all in the shape of wolves; and from this source are those wolves sprung. The saying runs thus: from this race shall come one that shall be mightiest of all; he that is named Moon-Hound; he shall be filled with the flesh of all those men that die, and he shall swallow the moon, and sprinkle with blood the heavens and all the air; thereof shall the sun lose her shining, and the winds in that day shall be unquiet and roar on every side. — Snorri Sturluson

[To audience members who were arriving late] You haven't missed a thing, I was just killing time 'til you got here — Billy Connolly

Oh yes. I was telling you about my research into the old Norse sagas- the mythology of ancient Scandinavia. Have you read them?"
"Uh no."
"You'd like them, Cassie." He waved the hand with the chalk in it. "All sex and violence."
I frowned. "Why would you think that I'd- — Karen Chance

Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately. — Hanif Kureishi

I dislike Tolkien, another Oxonian Old Norse obsessive, with his war games and made-up language in a world without women. — Sarah Moss

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

They didn't mention the jealousy their love of each other had bred in him, that had flourished into deviousness and cruelty. The pain the day had brought would not easily pass, both were aware of that. And yet it had to be, since it was part of what there was. — William Trevor

It was one of those moments when you feel the future so much that it humbles the present. — David Levithan

If you look and listen for it, you'll see and hear synchronistic clues from the Universe that go past everyone else but have special meaning for you, guiding you to make the best of things. Look for synchronistic "winks" from the Universe. — Bill Harvey

She swung her legs around his waist and crossed her ankles behind his back. "I like the way your mind works," she panted before losing herself in the sensation of his hardness rubbing against her core. Lief took the few steps across the room to the bed in record time and flung her down on the covers. He leaned back to tear his clothes off. "My mind hardly works at all when you are near." She chuckled leaning back on her elbows, enjoying the view of naked flesh being revealed. She rose up on her knees and traced the ridges on his chest and abdomen. As her fingers trailed down toward his proud shaft, he captured her wrists.

"Be careful." He smiled down at her. "I'm loaded and might go off any minute."

She laughed. "You've been watching too many old Western movies with Harold. — Asa Maria Bradley

Today, the ideal male is the gay man and the ideal female is the worker female, the woman who can work in a coal mine just like all the other men. — Camille Paglia

Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are. — Jose Saramago

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

For [the] quick in wit and light in manners be either seldom troubled or very soon weary, in carrying a very heavy purse. — Roger Ascham

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

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