Beautiful Norway Quotes

What a beautiful name,” Kimberly said. “Does it mean anything? I love multicultural names because they have such wonderful meanings, from wonderful rich cultures.” Kimberly was smiling the kindly smile of people who thought “culture” the unfamiliar colorful reserve of colorful people, a word that always had to be qualified with “rich.” She would not think Norway had a “rich culture.

Out in the fjord I dragged myself up at once, wet with fever and exhaustion, and gazed landwards, and bade farewell for the present to the town – to Christiania, where the windows gleamed so brightly in all the homes.

I On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping White Ophelia floats like a great lily; Floats very slowly, lying in her long veils... - In the far-off woods you can hear them sound the mort. For more than a thousand years sad Ophelia Has passed, a white phantom, down the long black river. For more than a thousand years her sweet madness Has murmured its ballad to the evening breeze. The wind kisses her breasts and unfolds in a wreath Her great veils rising and falling with the waters; The shivering willows weep on her shoulder, The rushes lean over her wide, dreaming brow. The ruffled water-lilies are sighing around her; At times she rouses, in a slumbering alder, Some nest from which escapes a small rustle of wings; - A mysterious anthem falls from the golden stars. II O pale Ophelia! beautiful as snow! Yes child, you died, carried off by a river! - It was the winds descending from the great mountains of Norway That spoke to you in low voices of better freedom. It was a breath of wind, that, twisting your great hair, Brought strange rumors to your dreaming mind; It was your heart listening to the song of Nature In the groans of the tree and the sighs of the nights; It was the voice of mad seas, the great roar, That shattered your child's heart, too human and too soft; It was a handsome pale knight, a poor madman Who one April morning sate mute at your knees! Heaven! Love! Freedom! What a dream, oh poor crazed Girl! You melted to him as snow does to a fire; Your great visions strangled your words - And fearful Infinity terrified your blue eye! III - And the poet says that by starlight You come seeking, in the night, the flowers that you picked And that he has seen on the water, lying in her long veils White Ophelia floating, like a great lily.

Long ago, when faeries and men still wandered the earth as brothers, the MacLeod chief fell in love with a beautiful faery woman. They had no sooner married and borne a child when she was summoned to return to her people. Husband and wife said a tearful goodbye and parted ways at Fairy Bridge, which you can still visit today. Despite the grieving chief, a celebration was held to honor the birth of the newborn boy, the next great chief of the MacLeods. In all the excitement of the celebration, the baby boy was left in his cradle and the blanket slipped off. In the cold Highland night he began to cry. The baby’s cry tore at his mother, even in another dimension, and so she went to him, wrapping him in her shawl. When the nursemaid arrived, she found the young chief in the arms of his mother, and the faery woman gave her a song she insisted must be sung to the little boy each night. The song became known as “The Dunvegan Cradle Song,” and it has been sung to little chieflings ever since. The shawl, too, she left as a gift: if the clan were ever in dire need, all they would have to do was wave the flag she’d wrapped around her son, and the faery people would come to their aid. Use the gift wisely, she instructed. The magic of the flag will work three times and no more. As I stood there in Dunvegan Castle, gazing at the Fairy Flag beneath its layers of protective glass, it was hard to imagine the history behind it. The fabric was dated somewhere between the fourth and seventh centuries. The fibers had been analyzed and were believed to be from Syria or Rhodes. Some thought it was part of the robe of an early Christian saint. Others thought it was a part of the war banner for Harald Hardrada, king of Norway, who gave it to the clan as a gift. But there were still others who believed it had come from the shoulders of a beautiful faery maiden. And that faery blood had flowed through the MacLeod family veins ever since. Those people were the MacLeods themselves.

Once upon a time, in a little green house at the top of the world, there lived a girl who knew that stories didn't stay in their books. She discovered that other people didn't know this, didn't want to know this, and so she hid the things she found. Now the girl was a mother, and she had her very own daughter; a clever, sweet creature who filled her life with color and beauty. And the mother began to show her child the secrets that no one else saw.

Gro Rollag was no beauty, but she was a strong capable young woman with a long face, prominent cheekbones, high forehead, and a kindly intelligent look in her rather narrow eyes. According to family lore, she was not the most conscientious housekeeper because she preferred reading to housework. A love of books and reading ran in the family. Of all the possessions they were forced to sell or leave behind in Norway, what the Rollags remembered with deepest regret was the library they inherited from an eighteenth-century ancestor - lovely old books sold to pay for their passage to America.

There are similar concepts to hygge in a few other countries: Wabi-sabi from Japan is the idea of finding the beauty in things that are imperfect. Friluftsliv from Norway translates to “open-air life.” This is about living a life of enjoying nature. Gemütlichkeit from Germany is akin to hygge. Gezelligheid from Holland is also much like hygge.

Nothing, in fact, can equal the beauty of the northern summer’s evening and night, if night it may be called that only wants the glare of day, the full light which frequently seems so impertinent, for I could write at midnight very well without a candle.  I contemplated all Nature at rest; the rocks, even grown darker in their appearance, looked as if they partook of the general repose, and reclined more heavily on their foundation.  “What,” I exclaimed, “is this active principle which keeps me still awake?  Why fly my thoughts abroad, when everything around me appears at home?”  My child was sleeping with equal calmness—innocent and sweet as the closing flowers.

The Americans fished on, not hoping for much anymore, perhaps for a miracle, searching for small things to be happy about, because they were Americans and this was what their upbringings had taught them to do. They found a brief happiness, for example, in the potato chips that came to their rooms on expensive china and in the genuinely hopeful way the hotel girl asked if they’d had any luck. They took pleasure in their morning calls to the Lufthansa man, his wriggly explanations for the canceled flights to Norway. They smiled at the way a church had been built so the setting sun hit it high and perfect and orange, and the way they could follow the river to a park where miniskirted women lay in the grass with headphones clamped over their ears, and even at the way the little student-girls came filing down at noon behind their English-teaching beauty to call them fools.

He mailed me a Christmas card every year, one of those newsletters that foreigners send to their friends with domestic news and photos of triumphant families. They only tell of their successes in these collective missives: travels, births and marriages. No one ever goes bankrupt, is sent to prison, or has cancer, no one commits suicide or gets divorced. Luckily that stupid tradition doesn’t exist in our culture. Harald Fiske’s newsletters were even worse than the idyllic families’: birds, birds, and more birds, birds from Borneo, birds from Guatemala, birds from the Arctic. Yes, apparently there are even birds in the Arctic. I think I already told you that the man was in love with our country, which he said was the most beautiful place in the world since we had every type of landscape: a lunar desert, long coastline, tall mountains, pristine lakes, valleys of orchards and vineyards, fjords and glaciers. He thought we were friendly and welcoming people because he judged us with his romantic heart and little real-life experience. However odd his reasons, he decided he was going to live out his final days here. I never understood it, Camilo, because if you can live legally in Norway, you’d have to be demented to move to this catastrophic country.

India and Pakistan have nuclear bombs now and feel entirely justified in having them. Soon others will, too. Israel, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Nepal (I’m trying to be eclectic here), Denmark, Germany, Bhutan, Mexico, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Burma, Bosnia, Singapore, North Korea, Sweden, South Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan … and why not? Every country in the world has a special case to make. Everybody has borders and beliefs. And when all our larders are bursting with shiny bombs and our bellies are empty (deterrence is an exorbitant beast), we can trade bombs for food. And when nuclear technology goes on the market, when it gets truly competitive and prices fall, not just governments, but anybody who can afford it can have their own private arsenal—businessmen, terrorists, perhaps even the occasional rich writer (like myself). Our planet will bristle with beautiful missiles. There will be a new world order. The dictatorship of the pro-nuke elite. We can get our kicks by threatening each other. It’ll be like bungee jumping when you can’t rely on the bungee cord, or playing Russian roulette all day long. An additional perk will be the thrill of Not Knowing What to Believe. We can be victims of the predatory imagination of every green card–seeking charlatan who surfaces in the West with concocted stories of imminent missile attacks. We can delight at the prospect of being held to ransom by every petty troublemaker and rumormonger, the more the merrier if truth be told, anything for an excuse to make more bombs. So you see, even without a war, we have a lot to look forward to.

It had been on one of those packages they advertised in the travel pages of the papers on a Saturday. “See the Northern Lights—Five-Day Cruise off the Coast of Norway,” “The Wonders of Prague,” “Beautiful Bordeaux—Wine Tasting for the Beginner,” “Autumn on Lake Como.” It offered a safe way to travel (the coward’s way), everything was organized for you so that all you had to do was turn up with your passport. Middle-class, middle-aged, middle England. And middle Scotland, of course. Safety in numbers, in the herd.

Imagine the everyday occurrence where you meet one basic need, only to find that the next need follows immediately. Think of a waterfall. I watched in wonder as I witnessed one waterfall after another from a train window in beautiful Norway. There was no end to those tiny water droplets. They just kept falling. In fact, everyone’s basic needs seem like a waterfall that just keeps cascading, spilling one need after another, especially when you live with other people and have their needs to consider along with your own.

wall while swinging from the rope bridge. At the top of the wall was a zip line with handlebars you had to grab. After that point, it was difficult to see the rest of the course. There were walls among walls blocking the view. It looked like there were spinning pillars scattered throughout it. I saw other pools of water and mud that the runner would have to avoid or worse yet, swim across. At the end of the course, there was a flat open space with barriers scattered throughout. High above the open space was a gun that shot tennis balls the runner had to avoid. The course was a monster. “Beauty, ain’t she?” Mr. Cooper said proudly as he approached us. “Just got her imported from Norway. The pamphlet said it was something that the Vikings themselves trained with, but somehow I doubt that. It also says ninety nine percent of students who attempt it can’t make it past the first rope bridge.” “What’s it doing here?” Carlyle asked. “Will students be running it today?” Mr. Cooper shook his head. “Oh no, it’s not ready by any means, legally I mean, buuuuut…,” the gym teacher trailed off as he glanced over his shoulder. “I didn’t see nothin’.” “Race ya,” Brayden said as he smiled at me. “How can I possibly say no?” I asked as I started running toward the obstacle course at full speed. When I reached the rope bridge, I didn’t hesitate and started climbing. Grabbing the ropes, I balanced myself and walked as quickly as possible over the pool of water. I

I saw that I had forgotten how beautiful the drive to Thunder Bay was; the towering sighing groves of fragrant Norway pines, the broad expanses of clean white sand, the sea gulls, always the endlessly wheeling sea gulls; an occasional bald eagle seeming bent on soaring straight up to heaven; the intermittent craggy and pine-clad granite or sandstone hills, sometimes rising gauntly to the dignity of small mountains, then again, sudden stretches of sand or more majestic Norway pines -- and always, of course, the vast glittering heaving lake, the world's largest inland sea, as treacherous and deceitful as a spurned woman, either caressing or raging at the shore, more often turbulent than not, but today on its best company manners, presenting the falsely placid aspect of a mill pond.

I walked on, still delighted with the rude beauties of the scene; for the sublime often gave place imperceptibly to the beautiful, dilating the emotions which were painfully concentrated.

I peel the flax into strands and weave them into a short length of cord, which I then use to lash together a framework for the butterflied trout, a technique I learned on a course Mike and I went on before one of our Norway trips. I gather some wood and get a fire going, and I cook the fish. As banal as all that sounds, I am loving every minute of this. So I am going to repeat myself. Every second is infused with this heart-swelling awareness of my surroundings. Not only am I in this place of exceptional beauty, of tranquillity, of unsullied nature at its best, I am also cooking (over a fire I started from scratch) a fish that I caught in this river less than an hour ago, a fish that I then gutted, cleaned, butterflied and tethered to a tool of foraged wood that I bound together with cord I made from leaves that were, until not long ago, happily growing beside this river. I needed to reiterate that. It’s the most natural thing in the world, man as hunter-gatherer, living off the land. But it’s nearly all stuff that most of us have forgotten about, stuff that has been regrettably replaced with technology and noise and materialism.

Vi sitter på varden og lar blikket seile. Fra jøkelens islys i øst til Lofotvæggens hilderland i vest under havranden. Det ryker av dypet og det driver av himlen, mens storm og tåke knuses mot hjørner og gjél. Og syn og sus flyter sammen til en saga om mineralets evige suverænitet.

I saw an even more egregious example of this a few years later. I had moved to Edmonton to finish my undergraduate degree. I took an apartment with my sister, who was studying to be a nurse. She was also an up-and-out-of-there person. (Not too many years later she would plant strawberries in Norway and run safaris through Africa and smuggle trucks across the Tuareg-menaced Sahara Desert, and babysit orphan gorillas in the Congo.) We had a nice place in a new high-rise, overlooking the broad valley of the North Saskatchewan River. We had a view of the city skyline in the background. I bought a beautiful new Yamaha upright piano, in a fit of enthusiasm. The place looked good