Karen Blixen Quotes

“A great artist is never poor.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Natives dislike speed, as we dislike noise, it is to them, at the best, hard to bear. They are also on friendly terms with time, and the plan of beguiling or killing it does not come into their heads. In fact the more time you can give them, the happier they are, and if you commission a Kikuyu to hold your horse while you make a visit, you can see by his face that he hopes you will be a long, long time about it. He does not try to pass the time then, but sits down and lives.”

“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.”

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

“The cure for anything is salt water: tears, sweat or the sea.”

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