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What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?--Experience, old people's experience.

Isak Dinesen

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Isak Dinesen
Dearly
Refused
Offered
Bought
Often
Experience
Nothing
People

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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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My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady.
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It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.
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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.
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To be a person is to have a story to tell.
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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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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.
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I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open to them.
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Then Martine said: So yuo will be poor now all your life, Babette? Poor? said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor.We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.
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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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We invent the past and remember the future.
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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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Be not afraid of absurdity do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous solution. Be brave, be brave.
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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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You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
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In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself-all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married.
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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.
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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.
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One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.
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