Quotes from Isak Dinesen

One may take many liberties with God which one cannot take with men.

In the mind and nature of a man a secret is an ugly thing, like a hidden physical defect.

A giraffe is so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plains in long garb, draperies of morning mist her mirage.

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.

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.

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.

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?

People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue.

our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.

Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.

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

I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

Of all the idiots I have met in my life and the Lord knows that they have not been few or little I think that I have been the biggest.

There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne — bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive.

There is something about Safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows

To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.

We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.

But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.

To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself.

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.

Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.

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.

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.

There are many ways to the recognition of truth, and Burgundy is one of them.