Isak Dinesen
Isak Dinesen
Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke, née Karen Christenze Dinesen, was a Danish author, also known by the pen name Isak Dinesen, who wrote works in Danish, French and English. She also at times used the pen names Tania Blixen, Osceola, and Pierre Andrézel...
eye noses half
The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity . I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.
tired night long-grass
The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent. In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing. The grass was me , and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorn trees.
paris splendor felt
I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.
useless tribes ancient
I belong to an ancient, idle, wild, and useless tribe... I am a storyteller.
summer dream morning
The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.
concerned good-will
There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned
failure ideas bears
While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.
reality order fiction
A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.
world able live-in-the-present
God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.
heart long trying
I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart.
encouraging perseverance time
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.
coffee soul body
Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the Word of the Lord is to the soul.
suffering stories bearable
All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.
grieving people house
The consolations of the vulgar are bitter in the royal ear. Let physicians and confectioners and servants in the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are. I have been told that lions, trapped and shut up in cages, grieve from shame more than from hunger.