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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
Experience
Nothing
People
Dearly
Refused
Offered
Bought
Often

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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.
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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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I don't think... one get a flash of happiness once, and never again it is there deep within you.
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The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
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We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.
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It's an odd feeling-farewell-there is some envy in it. Men go off to be tested for courage and if we're tested at all, it's for patience, for doing without, for how well we can endure loneliness.
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our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.
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Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine.
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Real art must always involve some witchcraft.
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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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To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself.
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I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
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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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One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.
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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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It is more than their land that you take away from the people, whose native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take their eyes.
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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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death - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.
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Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.
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