And Ásta Sóllilja, it was she who swept on wings of poetry into those

spheres which she had sensed as if in distant murmur one spring night
last year when she was reading about the little girl who journeyed
over the seven mountains; and the distant murmur had suddenly swelled
to a song in her ears, and her soul found here for the first time its
origin and its descent; happiness, fate, sorrow, she understood them
all; and many other things. When a man looks at a flowering plant
growing slender and helpless up in the wilderness among a hundred
thousand stones, and he has found this plant only by chance, then he
asks: Why is it that life is always trying to burst forth? Should
one pull up this plant and use it to clean one's pipe? No, for this
plant also broods over the limitation and the unlimitation of all
life, and lives in the love of the good beyond these hundred thousand
stones, like you and me; water it with care, but do not uproot it,
maybe it is little Ásta Sóllilja.

Halldór Kiljan Laxness, Sjálfstætt fólk, Island, 1935

[Independent People, J. A. Thompson, transl., 1946]