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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

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Isak Dinesen
Believe
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death - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.
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You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
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The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
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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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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.
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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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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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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?
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The flamingoes are the most delicately colored of all the African birds, pink and red like a flying twig of an oleander bush. They have incredibly long legs and bizarre and recherché curves of their necks and bodies, as if from some exquisite traditional prudery they were making all attitudes and movements in life as difficult as possible.
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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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I have before seen other countries, in the same manner, give themselves to you when you are about to leave them.
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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.
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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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The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
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I don't believe in evil I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
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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.
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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?
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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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Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.
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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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