Karen Blixen Quotes

#1. It's an odd feeling-farewell-there is some envy in it. Men go off to be tested for courage and if we're tested at all, it's for patience, for doing without, for how well we can endure loneliness.

Karen Blixen

#2. The barbarian loves his own pride, and hates, or disbelieves in, the pride of others. I will be a civilized being, I will love the pride of my adversaries, of my servants, and my lover; and my house shall be, in all humility, in the wilderness a civilized place.

Karen Blixen

#3. I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

Karen Blixen

#4. We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.

Karen Blixen

#5. It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.

Karen Blixen

#6. All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.

Karen Blixen

#7. For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.

Karen Blixen

#8. Then Martine said: "So yuo will be poor now all your life, Babette?"
Poor?" said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. "No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor.We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.

Karen Blixen

#9. When I heard this I became very sad, but I thought that now I would indeed have to take him with me so that the Virgin herself could enlighten him.

Karen Blixen

#10. To die for the one you loved was an effort too sweet for words.

Karen Blixen

#11. A medal is an inconvenient thing to give to a naked man, because he has got no place to fix it on to.

Karen Blixen

#12. And I had by now become used to the idea of witchcraft, it seemed a reasonable thing, so many things are about, at night, in Africa.

Karen Blixen

#13. Perhaps to them the first condition for anything having real charm was this: that it must not really exist.

Karen Blixen

#14. I have conquered them all, but I am standing amongst graves

Karen Blixen

#15. A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the panis angelorum.

Karen Blixen

#16. When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.

Karen Blixen

#17. When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.

Karen Blixen

#18. The views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequealled nobility.

Karen Blixen

#19. There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned

Karen Blixen

#20. Love the pride of the conquered nations, and leave them to honour their father and their mother.

Karen Blixen

#21. A great artist is never poor.

Karen Blixen

#22. We can only go to the limits of ourselves. Anything more and we give too much away. Then we're not good for anyone.

Paula McLain

#23. Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest.

Karen Blixen

#24. I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.

Karen Blixen

#25. Come now and let us go and risk our lives unnecessarily. For if they have got any value at all it is this that they gave got none. Frei lebt wer sterben kann.

Karen Blixen

#26. Up in this air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.

Karen Blixen

#27. Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.

Karen Blixen

#28. Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.

Karen Blixen

#29. Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.

Karen Blixen

#30. In a world of fools, I was, I think, to him one of the greater fools.

Karen Blixen

#31. The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue.

Karen Blixen

#32. Msabu's bleeding. She does not have this ox. This lion is hungry. He does not have this ox. This wagon is heavy. It doesn't have this ox. God is happy, msabu. He plays with us.

Karen Blixen

#33. Through the loveliness and power of her dream world she was now, in her old frock and botched shoes, very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth

Karen Blixen

#34. The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the salt sea.

Karen Blixen

#35. Between the river in the mellow English landscape and the African mountain ridge, ran the path of this life ... The bowstring was released on the bridge at Eton, the arrow described its orbit, and hit the obelisk in the Ngong Hills.

Karen Blixen

#36. Where, My Lord, is music bred - upon the instrument or within the ear that listens? The loveliness of woman is created in the eye of man.

Karen Blixen

#37. When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.

Karen Blixen

#38. The young (Somali) women were very inquisitive as to European customs, and listened attentively to descriptions of the manners, education, and clothes of white ladies, as if out to complete their strategic education with the knowledge of how the males of an alien race were conquered and subdued.

Karen Blixen

#39. No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.

Karen Blixen

#40. Here I am, where I ought to be.

Karen Blixen

#41. There is a particular hapiness in giving a man whom you like very much, good food that you have cooked yourself.

Karen Blixen

#42. I know of a cure for everything: salt water ... in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.

Karen Blixen

#43. Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.

Karen Blixen

#44. Our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.

Karen Blixen

#45. Still, we often talked on the farm of the Safaris that we had been on. Camping places fix themselves in your mind as if you had spent long periods of your life in them. You will remember a curve of your wagon track in the grass of the plain, like the features of a friend.

Karen Blixen

#46. God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.

Karen Blixen

#47. I turned to the animal world from the world of men; my heart was heavy with the tragedy of the night.

Karen Blixen

#48. Much which is unworthy in human life might be avoided if people would only accustom themselves to talking in verse

Karen Blixen

#49. It is more than their land that you take away from the people whose native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see, and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take out their eyes.

Karen Blixen