Quotes from Karen von Blixen-Finecke

The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.

It never has happened, and it never will happen, and that is why it is told.

When soon I sail from here, I may again run into such a storm as the one in Kvasefjord. But this time I shall clearly understand that it is not a play in the theatre, but it is death. and it seems too that then, in the last moment before we go down, I can in in all truth be yours...

I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser...

Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.

Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker's mind.

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.

I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch ... and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order ... by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery.

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?