Karen Blixen Quotes

“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”

“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.”

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

“I have read true piety defined as: loving one’s destiny unconditionally – and there is something in it. That is to say: I think that in a way this sort of 'religiousness' is the condition for real happiness. ”

“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.”

“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.”

“It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.”

“A great artist is never poor. We have something of which other people know nothing.”

“Much which is unworthy in human life might be avoided if people would only accustom themselves to talking in verse”

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

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

“To die for the one you loved was an effort too sweet for words.”

“If a man can devote himself undisturbed to the work which is on his mind, he can, as far I have observed, completely ignore his surroundings.

They disappear for him; he can sit in filth and disorder, draught and cold, and be completely happy.

For most women it is insufferable to sit in a room if the color scheme displeases them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Circumstances can have a motive force by which they bring about events without aid of human imagination or apprehension.

On such occasions you yourself keep in touch with what is going on by attentively following it from moment to moment, like a blind person who is being led, and who places one foot in front of the other cautiously but unwittingly.

Things are happening to you, and you feel them happening, but except for this one fact, you have no connection with them, and no key to the cause or meaning of them. passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.”

“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.”

“He conveyed a strange impression of being in safety, and completely secure. He had a courteous little manner with him, and smiled and nodded, as I pointed out the hills and the tall trees to him, as if he were interested in everything, and incapable of surprise at anything.

I wondered if this consistency was produced by an entire ignorance of the evil of the world, or by a deep knowledge and acceptance of it.”

“He lives free who can die.”

“Here I am, where I ought to be.”

“I have conquered them all, but I am standing amongst graves.”

“In a world of fools, I was, I think, to him one of the greater fools.”