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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
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Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.
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When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.
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You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
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When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.
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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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I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
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There is something about Safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows
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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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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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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.
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our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.
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The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
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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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For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.
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It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.
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