“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.”
— Isak Dinesen
“You can’t change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.”
“Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.”
“To be a person is to have a story to tell.”
“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.”
“You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.”
“Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.”
“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.”
“We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.”
“There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne – bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive.”
“Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence.”
“Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous solution. Be brave, be brave.”
“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
“I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”
“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.”
“And I had by now become used to the idea of witchcraft, it seemed a reasonable thing, so many things are about, at night, in Africa.”
“And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.”
“If there were one more thing I could do, it would be to go on safari once again.”
“Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the Word of the Lord is to the soul.”
“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.”
“All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.”
“What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?”
“I don’t believe in evil; I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.”
“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 their eyes.”
“God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.”
“The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.”
“For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people’s way of committing suicide.”
“Real art must always involve some witchcraft.”
“There are many ways to the recognition of truth, and Burgundy is one of them.”
“To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself.”
“If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages...”
“Here I am, where I am supposed to be.”
“A giraffe is so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plains in long garb, draperies of morning mist her mirage.”
“There are times of great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist of the drizzling rain.”
“The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.”
“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.”
“Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.”
“When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.”
“In the mind and nature of a man a secret is an ugly thing, like a hidden physical defect.”
“There is something about Safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows.”
“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.”
“I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart.”
“Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons nor divided the substance.”
“Some people have an unconquerable love of riddles. They may have the chance of listening to plain sense, or to such wisdom that explains life; but no, they must go and work their brains over a riddle, just because they do not understand what it means.”
“All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.”
“In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself-all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married.”
“One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best...”
“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.”
“As we grow old we slowly come to believe that everything will turn out badly for us, and that failure is in the nature of things; but then we do not much mind what happens to us one way or the other.”
“To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.”
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