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Then Martine said: So yuo will be poor now all your life, Babette? Poor? said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor.We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.

Isak Dinesen

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Isak Dinesen
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More quotes by Isak Dinesen

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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.
Isak Dinesen
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Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.
Isak Dinesen
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The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
Isak Dinesen
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In the Ngong Forest I have also seen, on a narrow path through thick growth, in the middle of a very hot day, the Giant Forest Hog, a rare person to meet.
Isak Dinesen
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through the loveliness and power of her dream world she was now, in her old frock and botched shoes, very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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Where a pack of monkeys had traveled over the road, the smell of them lingered for a long time in the air, a dry and stale, mousy smell.
Isak Dinesen
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We invent the past and remember the future.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.
Isak Dinesen
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The flamingoes are the most delicately colored of all the African birds, pink and red like a flying twig of an oleander bush. They have incredibly long legs and bizarre and recherché curves of their necks and bodies, as if from some exquisite traditional prudery they were making all attitudes and movements in life as difficult as possible.
Isak Dinesen
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Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the role of the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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It is when people are told their own thoughts that they think they are being insulted.
Isak Dinesen
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The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity . I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.
Isak Dinesen
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I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open to them.
Isak Dinesen