Quotes from Isak Dinesen

A great artist is never poor.

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.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?--Experience, old people's experience.

And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.

You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.

Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 - to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90.

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.

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.