Isak Dinesen Quotes - Page 3

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• People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will.

  Isak Dinesen

  Dream, Real, Lying

  Isak Dinesen (1938). “Out of Africa”

  5 Copy quote

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

  Isak Dinesen

  Mark

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Isak Dinesen

  Loneliness, Farewell, Men

  25 Copy quote

• People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue.

  Isak Dinesen

  Dream, Sleep, Heart

  Isak Dinesen (1938). “Out of Africa”

  15 Copy quote

• A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.

  Isak Dinesen

  Reality, Order, Fiction

  20 Copy quote

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

  Isak Dinesen

  Caught, Rhythm

  Isak Dinesen (1987). “Out of Africa”, Crown Pub

  5 Copy quote

• What is life when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent, accurately set, infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful puppies into old mangy blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags, and succulent young boys, to whom the world holds great delights and terrors, into old weak men, with running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn?

  Isak Dinesen

  Running, Dog, Horse

  23 Copy quote

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

  Isak Dinesen

  Men, Giving, Good Food

  Isak Dinesen (1987). “Out of Africa”, Crown Pub

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  Isak Dinesen

  Going Away, Looks, Strange

  Isak Dinesen (1987). “Out of Africa”, Crown Pub

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Isak Dinesen

  Morning, Heart, Air

  Isak Dinesen (1952). “Out of Africa, with an introduction by Bernardine Kielty”

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Patterns, Fantasy, Infinite

  Interview with Bent Mohn, The New York Times Book Review, November 3, 1957.

  10 Copy quote

• If there were one more thing I could do, it would be to go on safari once again.

  Isak Dinesen

  Would Be, Safari, Goes On

  11 Copy quote

• I had seen a herd of Buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished.

  Isak Dinesen

  Morning, Eye, Dark

  Isak Dinesen (1938). “Out of Africa”

  12 Copy quote

• We invent the past and remember the future.

  Isak Dinesen

  Past, Imagination, Remember

  8 Copy quote

• It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution. But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space.

  Isak Dinesen

  Dream, Taken, Heart

  Isak Dinesen (1938). “Out of Africa”

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Isak Dinesen

  Writing, Character, Feelings

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Isak Dinesen

  Artist, People, Poor

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Isak Dinesen

  Thinking, Littles, Idiot

  4 Copy quote

• The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.

  Isak Dinesen

  Play, Sacred

  Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen (1987). “On Modern Marriage and Other Observations”

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Law, Tragedy, Salvation

  Isak Dinesen (2011). “Winter's Tales”, p.56, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

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

  Isak Dinesen

  Paris, Splendor, Felt

  4 Copy quote

• Truth is for tailors and shoemakers. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades.

  Isak Dinesen

  Tailors, Truth Is, Lord

  "A brief survey of the short story: Isak Dinesen" by Chris Power, www.theguardian.com. May 20, 2014.

  12 Copy quote

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

  Isak Dinesen

  Rain, Feelings, May

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• I have before seen other countries, in the same manner, give themselves to you when you are about to leave them.

  Isak Dinesen

  Country, Giving, Other Countries

  Isak Dinesen (1987). “Out of Africa”, Crown Pub

  13 Copy quote

• 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 their eyes.

  Isak Dinesen

  Eye, Past, Land

  Isak Dinesen (1987). “Out of Africa”, Crown Pub

  6 Copy quote

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