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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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Isak Dinesen
Possibility
Youth
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Death
Intolerable
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Ridicule
Young
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Ideas
Bears
Even
Failure

More quotes by Isak Dinesen

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One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best.
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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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What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?--Experience, old people's experience.
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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.
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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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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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Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to 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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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.
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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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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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My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady.
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Real art must always involve some witchcraft.
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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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When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.
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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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I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open to them.
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.
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There is something about Safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows
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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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