Abe

“Like the boy who drives his little Indian pigs to the fold, whose obstinacy impels them divers ways, and thus obliges him first to apply to one and then to another till he can succeed in penning them all, so are we obliged to play the same game with the personages of our story.”
― Alessandro Manzoni, The Bethrothed

“It’s better than anything either Laxness or Thórberger Thordarson write. We might be talking about a new Nobel Prize winner, Hekla.”
“Has he had anything published?”
“Not yet.”
― Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Miss Iceland

“New and strange emotions arose in the mind of Gertrude. … She replied, that no one could oblige her to take the veil, without her own consent; that she could also marry, inhabit a palace, and enjoy the world; that she could if she wished it; that she would wish it, and did wish it. The necessity of her own consent, hitherto little considered, became henceforth the ruling thought of her mind; she called it to her aid, at all times, when she desired to luxuriate in the pleasing images of future felicity.”
― Alessandro Manzoni, The Bethrothed

“The grandeur of [great artists] works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generation of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.”
― William Hazlitt, The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things