Quote

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?

Isak Dinesen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Isak Dinesen
Story
Universe
Stories
Cry
Character
Characters
Whole
Answer
Heart
Authority
Answers
Within

More quotes by Isak Dinesen

Image
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
Image
I do not see eye to eye with the camera.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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
Image
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.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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.
Isak Dinesen
Image
Here I am, where I am supposed to be.
Isak Dinesen
Image
I don't think... one get a flash of happiness once, and never again it is there deep within you.
Isak Dinesen
Image
To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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
Image
Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons nor divided the substance.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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
Image
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.
Isak Dinesen
Image
For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.
Isak Dinesen
Image
We invent the past and remember the future.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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
Image
You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.
Isak Dinesen
Image
death - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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
Image
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