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.”