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You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.

Isak Dinesen

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Isak Dinesen
Present
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Future
Past
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Ruins

More quotes by Isak Dinesen

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Within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: Who am I?
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You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
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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.
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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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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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I don't think... one get a flash of happiness once, and never again it is there deep within you.
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Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.
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The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.
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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.
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To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself.
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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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We invent the past and remember the future.
Isak Dinesen
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To be a person is to have a story to tell.
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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 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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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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God made the world, My Lord, and looked at it, and saw that it was good. Yes. But what if the world had looked back at him, to see whether he was good or not?
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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There are times of great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist of the drizzling rain.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen