Isak Dinesen Quotes

Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the Word of the Lord is to the soul.

Here I am, where I am supposed to be.

What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?
Experience, old people's experience.

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

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

To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.

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

If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages ...

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

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

My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady ...

I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open to them.

All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.

Real art must always involve some witchcraft.

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

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

Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.

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.

hornbill was another visitor to the farm, and came there to

But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.

It is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flier is the flight itself.

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

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

People work much in order to secure the future; I gave my mind much work and trouble, trying to secure the past.

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.

I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

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

Be unswervingly and eternally loyal to the story.

Life and death are like two locked caskets, each of which contains the key to the other.

There are many ways to the recognition of truth, and Burgundy is one of them.

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

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

I do not see eye to eye with the camera.

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

It is when people are told their own thoughts that they think they are being insulted.

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

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

The divine art is the story.

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

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

Very old families will sometimes feel upon them the shadow of annihilation.

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

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

We invent the past and remember the future.

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

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

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.

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