“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.”
“We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.”
“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
“I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.”
“God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There are many ways to the recognition of truth, and Burgundy is one of them.”
“Real art must always involve some witchcraft.”
“To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself.”
“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.”
“Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.”
“For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people’s way of committing suicide.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.”
“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.”
“One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best...”
“All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.”
“Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 – to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90.”
“The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.”
“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.”
“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.”
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