Karen Blixen Quotes
Best 24 Out of Africa Quotes by Karen Blixen
Out of Africa Quotes
“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.”
“It is impossible that a town will not play a part in your life, it does not even make much difference whether you have more good or bad things to say of it, it draws your mind to it, by a mental law of gravitation.”
“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.”
“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.
The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of...”
“Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.”
“The barbarian loves his own pride, and hates, or disbelieves in, the pride of others. I will be a civilized being, I will love the pride of my adversaries, of my servants, and my lover; and my house shall be, in all humility, in the wilderness a civilized place.”
“The Kikuyu, when left to themselves, do not bury their dead, but leave them above ground for the hyenas and vultures to deal with.
The custom had always appealed to me, I thought that it would be pleasant thing to be laid out to the sun and the stars, and to be so promptly, neatly, and openly picked and cleansed; to be made one with Nature and become a common component of a landscape.”
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“In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.”
“The views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequealled nobility.”
“The young Somali women were very inquisitive as to European customs, and listened attentively to descriptions of the manners, education, and clothes of white ladies, as if out to complete their strategic education with the knowledge of how the males of an alien race were conquered and subdued.”
“There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned.”
“There is a particular hapiness in giving a man whom you like very much, good food that you have cooked yourself.”
“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.”
“When the gods want to punish us, they grant our wishes.”
“When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.”
“You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.”
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“When you are down and out, something always turns up - usually the noses of your friends.”
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