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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?

Isak Dinesen

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Isak Dinesen
Thinking
Red
Machines
Wine
Infinite
Minutely
Upon
Urine
Come
Ingenious
Men
Turning
Think
Machine

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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.
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While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.
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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 think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
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Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.
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And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.
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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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One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best.
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I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.
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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.
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I don't think... one get a flash of happiness once, and never again it is there deep within you.
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our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.
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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.
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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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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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Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.
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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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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.
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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.
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It is little silly to be a caricature of something of which you know very little, and which means very little to you, but to be your own caricature — that is the true carnival!
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