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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!

Isak Dinesen

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Isak Dinesen
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More quotes by Isak Dinesen

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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.
Isak Dinesen
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To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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We invent the past and remember the future.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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I arrived at the conviction that we should, more easily and more thoroughly than we now do or ever have done, understand the nature and the laws of the Cosmos if we would from the beginning recognize its originator and upholder as being of the female sex.
Isak Dinesen
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Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.
Isak Dinesen
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For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.
Isak Dinesen
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The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
Isak Dinesen
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Do you know a cure for me? Why yes, he said, I know a cure for everything. Salt water. Salt water? I asked him. Yes, he said, in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.
Isak Dinesen
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I had seen a herd of Elephant travelling through dense native forest ... pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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Where a pack of monkeys had traveled over the road, the smell of them lingered for a long time in the air, a dry and stale, mousy smell.
Isak Dinesen