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We invent the past and remember the future.

Isak Dinesen

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Isak Dinesen
Invent
Imagination
Future
Past
Remember

More quotes by Isak Dinesen

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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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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The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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I don't think... one get a flash of happiness once, and never again it is there deep within you.
Isak Dinesen
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No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.
Isak Dinesen
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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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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
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I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen