Top 88 Isak Dinesen Quotes
#1. As writer Isak Dinesen put it, All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.
Sue Monk Kidd
#2. What was it Isak Dinesen had said about salt as a cure? Tears, sweat, or the sea. She could use a cure.
Nina Post
#3. Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
Raymond Carver
#4. Life and death are like two locked caskets, each of which contains the key to the other.
Isak Dinesen
#5. To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.
Isak Dinesen
#6. It is an alarming experience to be, in your person, representing Christianity to the natives.
Isak Dinesen
#7. Within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: "Who am I?"
Isak Dinesen
#8. If there were one more thing I could do, it would be to go on safari once again.
Isak Dinesen
#9. What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?
Isak Dinesen
#10. After being told that the Professor "found it possible to believe for a moment in the existence of God," Isak thought, "Has it been possible to God, at Mount Elgon, to believe for a moment in the existence of Professor Landgreen?
Isak Dinesen
#11. Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine.
Isak Dinesen
#12. During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the role of the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity.
Isak Dinesen
#13. The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity . I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.
Isak Dinesen
#14. One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.
Isak Dinesen
#16. There are many ways to the recognition of truth, and Burgundy is one of them.
Isak Dinesen
#17. The tropical night has the companionability of a Roman Catholic Cathedral compared to the Protestant Churches of the North, which let you in on business only. Here in the great room everybody comes and goes, this is the place where things are going on.
Isak Dinesen
#18. And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.
Isak Dinesen
#19. I had seen a herd of Elephant travelling through dense native forest ... pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world.
Isak Dinesen
#21. I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open to them.
Isak Dinesen
#22. It is little silly to be a caricature of something of which you know very little, and which means very little to you, but to be your own caricature - that is the true carnival!
Isak Dinesen
#23. I have before seen other countries, in the same manner, give themselves to you when you are about to leave them ...
Isak Dinesen
#24. I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
Isak Dinesen
#25. Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous solution. Be brave, be brave.
Isak Dinesen
#26. In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself-all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married.
Isak Dinesen
#27. Some people have an unconquerable love of riddles. They may have the chance of listening to plain sense, or to such wisdom that explains life; but no, they must go and work their brains over a riddle, just because they do not understand what it means.
Isak Dinesen
#28. Truth is for tailors and shoemakers. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades.
Isak Dinesen
#29. Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the Word of the Lord is to the soul.
Isak Dinesen
#30. The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.
Isak Dinesen
#31. While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.
Isak Dinesen
#32. One may take many liberties with God which one cannot take with men.
Isak Dinesen
#33. Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.
Isak Dinesen
#34. The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
Isak Dinesen
#35. God made the world, My Lord, and looked at it, and saw that it was good. Yes. But what if the world had looked back at him, to see whether he was good or not?
Isak Dinesen
#36. I arrived at the conviction that we should, more easily and more thoroughly than we now do or ever have done, understand the nature and the laws of the Cosmos if we would from the beginning recognize its originator and upholder as being of the female sex.
Isak Dinesen
#37. I beg of you, you good people who want to hear stories told: look at this page and recognize the wisdom of my grandmother and of all old story-telling women!
Isak Dinesen
#38. The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.
Isak Dinesen
#39. Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons nor divided the substance.
Isak Dinesen
#40. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control.
Isak Dinesen
#41. Very old families will sometimes feel upon them the shadow of annihilation.
Isak Dinesen
#42. I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain at Ngong.
Isak Dinesen
#43. In the mind and nature of a man a secret is an ugly thing, like a hidden physical defect.
Isak Dinesen
#44. A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.
Isak Dinesen
#45. As we grow old we slowly come to believe that everything will turn out badly for us, and that failure is in the nature of things; but then we do not much mind what happens to us one way or the other.
Isak Dinesen
#46. The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.
Isak Dinesen
#47. I don't think ... one get a flash of happiness once, and never again; it is there deep within you ...
Isak Dinesen
#48. hornbill was another visitor to the farm, and came there to
Isak Dinesen
#49. Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker's mind.
Isak Dinesen
#50. Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 - to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90
Isak Dinesen
#51. Be unswervingly and eternally loyal to the story.
Isak Dinesen
#52. Some travelers are drawn forward by a goal lying before them in the way iron is drawn to the magnet. Others are driven on by a force lying behind them. In such a way the bowstring makes the arrow fly.
Isak Dinesen
#53. But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.
Isak Dinesen
#54. I have read or been told that in a book of etiquette of the seventeenth century the very first rule forbids you to tell your dreams to other people, since they cannot possibly be of interest to them.
Isak Dinesen
#55. All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.
Isak Dinesen
#56. Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.
Isak Dinesen
#58. My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady ...
Isak Dinesen
#59. There are times of great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist of the drizzling rain.
Isak Dinesen
#60. Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.
Isak Dinesen
#61. Therefore does the world love the Swedes, because in the midst of their woes they can draw it all to their bosom and be so galant that they shine a long way away.
Isak Dinesen
#62. Your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet, ... into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and appears to be, in some way, the truth about you. Even a flattering picture is ... a lie.
Isak Dinesen
#63. Where a pack of monkeys had traveled over the road, the smell of them lingered for a long time in the air, a dry and stale, mousy smell.
Isak Dinesen
#64. Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.
Isak Dinesen
#65. People work much in order to secure the future; I gave my mind much work and trouble, trying to secure the past.
Isak Dinesen
#66. It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings
Isak Dinesen
#67. There is something strangely determinate and fatal about a single shot in the night. It is as if someone had cried a message to you in one word, and would not repeat it.
Isak Dinesen
#68. What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?
Experience, old people's experience.
Isak Dinesen
#69. I do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at one time or another, been up on a broomstick.
Isak Dinesen
#70. I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart.
Isak Dinesen
#71. It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.
Isak Dinesen
#72. It is when people are told their own thoughts that they think they are being insulted.
Isak Dinesen
#73. The cure for anything is salt water - tears, sweat, or the sea.
Isak Dinesen
#74. In the Ngong Forest I have also seen, on a narrow path through thick growth, in the middle of a very hot day, the Giant Forest Hog, a rare person to meet.
Isak Dinesen
#75. One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best ...
Isak Dinesen
#76. Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.
Isak Dinesen
#77. I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
Isak Dinesen
#78. A giraffe is so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plains in long garb, draperies of morning mist her mirage.
Isak Dinesen
#79. It is impossible that a town will not play a part in your life, it does not even make much difference whether you have more good or bad things to say of it, it draws your mind to it, by a mental law of gravitation.
Isak Dinesen
#80. I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.
Isak Dinesen
#81. We invent the past and remember the future.
Isak Dinesen
#82. It is often the case with a new idea that when it comes knocking on society's door with modesty and the best premises for its existence, there is a tremendous outcry from inside.
Isak Dinesen
#83. It is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flier is the flight itself.
Isak Dinesen
#84. If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages ...
Isak Dinesen
#85. Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence.
Isak Dinesen
#86. Do you know ... what I think is a great pity? It is this: that we have all become such skeptics that we hardly believe what our pious grandmothers told us.
Isak Dinesen
#87. You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my "life has been wasted" here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know.
Isak Dinesen
#88. Real art must always involve some witchcraft.
Isak Dinesen
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