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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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through the loveliness and power of her dream world she was now, in her old frock and botched shoes, very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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As we grow old we slowly come to believe that everything will turn out badly for us, and that failure is in the nature of things but then we do not much mind what happens to us one way or the other.
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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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.
Isak Dinesen
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The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
Isak Dinesen
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My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady.
Isak Dinesen
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It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.
Isak Dinesen
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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?
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.
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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And I had by now become used to the idea of witchcraft, it seemed a reasonable thing, so many things are about, at night, in Africa.
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