The Sibyl Quotes

“Bitter, too, to be forced to acknowledge in one's heart how little love has to do with kindness.”
― Pär Lagerkvist, The Sibyl

“Nothing is more foreign than the world of one's childhood when one has truly left it.”
― Pär Lagerkvist, The Sibyl

“Malevolence, like love, needs few words.”
― Pär Lagerkvist, The Sibyl

“Eternity… It has nothing to do with life, I thought; it is the contrary to all life. It is something limitless, endless, a realm of death which the living must look into with horror. Was it here that I was to dwell?”
― Pär Lagerkvist, The Sibyl

“Only the gods have many destinies and need never die. They are filled with everything and experience everything. Everything - except human happiness. That they can never know and therefore they grudge it to men. Nothing makes them so evil and cruel as that men should presume to be happy and forget them for the sake of their earthly happiness.”
― Pär Lagerkvist, The Sibyl

“Yes, God was incomprehensible, cruel and frightening. She too had found him so – this sibyl who had known him as no one else had known him, who had been possessed by him, loved and cursed by him, who had lived her whole life for him and had even borne him a son. A son who must have come into the world just to show that meaninglessness too is divine.”
― Pär Lagerkvist, The Sibyl

“And besides, is he himself so loving? To those who love him he gives peace, they say, and he takes them up with him into his heaven; but they say he hurls those who don't believe in him into hell. If this is true, then he seems to be exactly like ourselves, just as good and just as bad. Those we love we too treat well, and and we wish the rest all the evil there is. If we had the power he has, we too perhaps would hurl them to damnation for all eternity, though we can't be sure. Only the malignity of a god, surely, could be great enough for that.”
― Pär Lagerkvist, The Sibyl

“I can see in your face that you're under god's curse and that what you say is true. It's plain that you're not free, that you're bound to him and that he doesn't mean to let you go. He is your destiny. Your soul is filled with him; through his curse you live a life with god. You hate him, you mock and revile him. But judging by your indignant words you care for nothing in the world but him, and are filled with him alone. With what you call your hatred of him. But this very red-hot hatred of god is perhaps your experience of the divine.”
― Pär Lagerkvist, The Sibyl

“I have seen God, as you have," he added after a time. "I have met him, and the meeting has filled my soul with horror."

The old woman was quite hidden from him in the darkness. But he heard her say in a low, almost toneless voice: "There is no joy in seeing God.”
― Pär Lagerkvist, The Sibyl