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For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.

Isak Dinesen

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Isak Dinesen
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Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.
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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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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.
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The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
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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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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
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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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When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.
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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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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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What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?--Experience, old people's experience.
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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.
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One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.
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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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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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Here I am, where I am supposed to be.
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It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.
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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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The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
Isak Dinesen