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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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Isak Dinesen
Time
Study
Landscape
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Painter
Unsettled
Half
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Tranquillity
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More quotes by 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.
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Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine.
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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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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.
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Real art must always involve some witchcraft.
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We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.
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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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There is something about Safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows
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For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.
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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.
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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.
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Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.
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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 is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.
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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 entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
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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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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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You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.
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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