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death - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.

Isak Dinesen

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Isak Dinesen
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Death
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More quotes by 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 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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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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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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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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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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Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.
Isak Dinesen
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The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.
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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When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
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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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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It is when people are told their own thoughts that they think they are being insulted.
Isak Dinesen
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One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.
Isak Dinesen
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Here I am, where I am supposed to be.
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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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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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?
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen