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

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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 do not see eye to eye with the camera.
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It is when people are told their own thoughts that they think they are being insulted.
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You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my life has been wasted here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know.
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I have before seen other countries, in the same manner, give themselves to you when you are about to leave them.
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For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.
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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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Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest.
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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.
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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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It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.
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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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our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.
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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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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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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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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.
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It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.
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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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You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.
Isak Dinesen