Quotes from Karen Blixen

Come now,' I said to him, 'and let us go and risk our lives unnecessarily. For if they have got any value at all it is this that they have got none. Frei lebt wer sterben kann.

From there, to the South-West, I saw the Ngong Hills. The noble wave of the mountain rose above the surrounding flat land, all air-blue. But it was so far away that the four peaks looked trifling, hardly distinguishable, and different from the way they looked from the farm. The outline of the mountain was slowly smoothed and levelled out by the hand of distance.

The great vault over our heads was gradually filled with clarity like a glass with wine.

I kept on believing that I should come to lay my bones in Africa. For this firm faith I had no other foundation, or no other reason, than my complete incompetency of imagining anything else.

Poi, prima di riprender sonno, mi chiedevo se, nei boschi, Lulu aveva mai sognato la sua campana.

One day I sold my table-glass, and then in the night thought better of it, so that in the morning I drove to Nairobi and asked the lady who had bought it to call off the deal. I had no place to put the glass, but the fingers and lips of many friends had touched it, they had given me excellent wine to drink out of it; it was keeping an echo of old table-talk, and I did not want to part with it. After all, I thought, it would be an easy thing to break.

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.

animals again will wander back a long way, and go through danger and sufferings, to recover their lost identity, in the surroundings that they know.

If they were to go away from their land, they must have people round them who had known it, and so could testify to their identity.

God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.

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.

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.

If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me?

A great artist is never poor.

When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.

Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.

The earth was made round so we would not see too far down the road.

I know of a cure for everything: salt water...in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.

There is a particular hapiness in giving a man whom you like very much, good food that you have cooked yourself.

Up in this air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.

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.

When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.

It is impossible that a town will not play a part in your life, it does not even make much difference whether you have more good or bad things to say of it, it draws your mind to it, by a mental law of gravitation.