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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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Isak Dinesen
Stills
Stillness
Still
Civilized
Take
Wild
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Accepted
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Lessons
Silence
Animal
Aptitude
Lost
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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
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If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages.
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The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
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One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best.
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I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
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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.
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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.
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I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open to them.
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Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.
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It is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flier is the flight itself.
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Humanity has made a great error in seizing on a certain moment, no more intrinsically notable than any other moment and has called it Birth. The habit of honoring one single instant of the universal process to the disadvantage of other instants has done more, perhaps, than anything to obfuscate the crystal clearness of the fundamental flux.
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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.
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I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.
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Here I am, where I am supposed to be.
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What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?--Experience, old people's experience.
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Do you know...what I think is a great pity? It is this: that we have all become such skeptics that we hardly believe what our pious grandmothers told us.
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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.
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Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.
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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.
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our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.
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