Isak Dinesen Quotes

death - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.

Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.

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.

The divine art is the story.

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

Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.

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.

One may take many liberties with God which one cannot take with men.

The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.

One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best.

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

And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.

I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain at Ngong.

A great artist is never poor.

It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.

Be unswervingly and eternally loyal to the story.

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?

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.

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.

I don't think... one get a flash of happiness once, and never again; it is there deep within you.

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.

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

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

I do not see eye to eye with the camera.

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!

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

While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.

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.

Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker's mind.

One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.

To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself.

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.

I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.

In the mind and nature of a man a secret is an ugly thing, like a hidden physical defect.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

In the mind and nature of a man a secret is an ugly thing like a hidden physical defect.

I don't think that... one gets a flash of happiness once and never again it is there within you and it will come as certainly as death.

I don't think that ... one gets a flash of happiness once and never again it is there within you and it will come as certainly as death....

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.

The cure for anything is salt water. Sweat, tears, or the ocean.

It is an alarming experience to be, in your person, representing Christianity to the natives.