Quotes from Isak Dinesen

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

I had seen a herd of elephant traveling through dense native forest… pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world.

The moment she had laid the child to the breast both became perfectly calm.

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?

Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine.

I have before seen other countries, in the same manner, give themselves to you when you are about to leave them.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

Do you know a cure for me?" "Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water." "Salt water?" I asked him. "Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.

You know you are truly alive when you're living among lions.

Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.

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? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?

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.

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

Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.

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

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

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.

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.

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.

A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the panis angelorum.

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

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

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.