Karen Blixen Quotes

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

The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, 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.

Here I am, where I ought to be.

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

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.

I have conquered them all, but I am standing amongst graves

In a world of fools, I was, I think, to him one of the greater fools.

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.

The views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequealled nobility.

There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned

For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.

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.

The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue.

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

We can only go to the limits of ourselves. Anything more and we give too much away. Then we're not good for anyone.

I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.

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

It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.

The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast....Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting.

It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.

Quando gli dei vogliono punirci, avverano i nostri desideri.

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

It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution. But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space.

The Kikuyu, when left to themselves, do not bury their dead, but leave them above ground for the hyenas and vultures to deal with. The custom had always appealed to me, I thought that it would be pleasant thing to be laid out to the sun and the stars, and to be so promptly, neatly, and openly picked and cleansed; to be made one with Nature and become a common component of a landscape.

Still, we often talked on the farm of the Safaris that we had been on. Camping places fix themselves in your mind as if you had spent long periods of your life in them. You will remember a curve of your wagon track in the grass of the plain, like the features of a friend.

I turned to the animal world from the world of men; my heart was heavy with the tragedy of the night.

Between the river in the mellow English landscape and the African mountain ridge, ran the path of this life. ... The bowstring was released on the bridge at Eton, the arrow described its orbit, and hit the obelisk in the Ngong Hills.

The barbarian loves his own pride, and hates, or disbelieves in, the pride of others. I will be a civilized being, I will love the pride of my adversaries, of my servants, and my lover; and my house shall be, in all humility, in the wilderness a civilized place.

He conveyed a strange impression of being in safety, and completely secure. He had a courteous little manner with him, and smiled and nodded, as I pointed out the hills and the tall trees to him, as if he were interested in everything, and incapable of surprise at anything. I wondered if this consistency was produced by an entire ignorance of the evil of the world, or by a deep knowledge and acceptance of it.

The young (Somali) women were very inquisitive as to European customs, and listened attentively to descriptions of the manners, education, and clothes of white ladies, as if out to complete their strategic education with the knowledge of how the males of an alien race were conquered and subdued.

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 out their eyes.

Själva längtan är beviset på att det vi längtar efter finns.

Where, My Lord, is music bred—upon the instrument or within the ear that listens? The loveliness of woman is created in the eye of man.

Der kom en vederkvægende ro, en dyb fred og fryd over mig, det var som når en feber ophører. "Her," tænkte jeg, "kan jeg blive.

To die for the one you loved was an effort too sweet for words.

Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! That which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!

Perhaps to them the first condition for anything having real charm was this: that it must not really exist.

Love the pride of the conquered nations, and leave them to honour their father and their mother.

Up at Meru I saw a young Native girl with a bracelet on, a leather strap two inches wide, and embroidered all over with very small turquoise-coloured beads which varied a little in colour and played in green, light blue, and ultramarine. It was an extraordinarily live thing; it seemed to draw breath on her arm, so that I wanted it for myself, and made Farah buy it from her. No sooner had it come upon my own arm than it gave up the ghost. It was nothing now, a small, cheap, purchased article of finery. It had been the play of colours, the duet between the turquoise and the 'nègre' - that quick, sweet, brownish black, like peat and black pottery, of the Native's skin - that had created the life of the bracelet.

Gud skapte mannen før kvinnen. Det er sånn som når jeg skriver. Først kladder jeg.

Msabu's bleeding. She does not have this ox. This lion is hungry. He does not have this ox. This wagon is heavy. It doesn't have this ox. God is happy, msabu. He plays with us.

When I heard this I became very sad, but I thought that now I would indeed have to take him with me so that the Virgin herself could enlighten him.

Eros colpisce come il fabbro con il martello sprizzando scintille dalla sfida. Hai spento il mio cuore tra lacrime e lamenti, come si spegne un fuoco incandescente del ruscello.

Circumstances can have a motive force by which they bring about events without aid of human imagination or apprehension. On such occasions you yourself keep in touch with what is going on by attentively following it from moment to moment, like a blind person who is being led, and who places one foot in front of the other cautiously but unwittingly. Things are happening to you, and you feel them happening, but except for this one fact, you have no connection with them, and no key to the cause or meaning of them. [...] - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.

She had what the Councillor knew, in the technical language of the ballet, as "ballon", a lightness that is not only the negation of weight, but which actually seems to carry upwards and make for flight, and which is rarely found in thin dancers - as if the matter itself had here become lighter than air, so that the more there is of it the better it works.

If I know a song of Africa,—I thought,—of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me? I

Within this enclosed women's world, so to say, behind the walls and fortifications of it, I felt the presence of a great ideal, without which the garrison would not have carried on so gallantly; the idea of a Millennium when women were to reign supreme in the world. The old mother at such times would take on a new shape, and sit enthroned as a massive dark symbol of that mighty female deity who had existed in old ages, before the time of the prophet's God. Of her they never lost sight, but they were, before all, practical people with an eye on the needs of the moment and with infinite readiness of resource.

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

I general brzo isprazni čašu. Jer kamo razuman čovjek može pobjeći kad ne može vjerovati u svoj razum? Bolje biti pijan nego lud.

A medal is an inconvenient thing to give to a naked man, because he has got no place to fix it on to.

And I had by now become used to the idea of witchcraft, it seemed a reasonable thing, so many things are about, at night, in Africa.

Karen Blixen wrote, in her Seven Gothic Tales, ‘I know a cure for everything: salt water . . . in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.

There is hardly any other sphere in which prejudice and superstition of the most horrific kind have been retained so long as in that of women, and just as it must have been an inexpressable relief for humanity when it shook off the burden of religious prejudice and superstition, I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open before them.

The thing which in the waking world comes nearest to a dream is night in a big town, where nobody knows one, or the African night. There too is infinite freedom: it is there that things are going on, destinies are made round you, there is activity to all sides, and it is none of your concern.

Estos baños son un gran placer para mí. Karen Blixen dijo en sus Seven Gothic Tales: «Conozco un remedio para todos los males: agua salada […] en cualquiera de sus formas. Sudor, lágrimas o agua de mar».

The author Karen Blixen once said, 'All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.' But what if a person can't tell a story about his sorrows? What if his story tells him?

The ideas of justice of Europe and Africa are not the same and those of the one world are unbearable to the other. To the African there is but one way of counter-balancing the catastrophes of existence, it shall be done by replacement; he does not look for the motive of an action. Whether you lie in wait for your enemy and cut his throat in the dark; or you fell a tree, and a thoughtless stranger passes by and is killed; so far as punishment goes, to the Native mind, it is the same thing. A loss has been brought upon the community and must be made up for, somewhere, by somebody. The Native will not give time or thought to the weighing of guilt or desert; either he fears that this may lead him too far, or he reasons that such things are no concerns of his. But he will devote himself, in endless speculations, to the method by which crime or disaster shall be weighed up in sheep and goats - time does not count to him; he leads you solemnly into a sacred maze of sophistry.

Why the Kikuyu, who personally have so little fear of death, should be so terrified to touch a corpse, while the white people, who are afraid to die, handle the dead easily, I do not know. Here once more you feel their reality to be different from our realities.

[Natives] are also on friendly terms with time, and the plan of beguiling or killing it does not come into their heads. In fact the more time you can give them, the happier they are, and if you commission a Kikuyu to hold your horse while you make a visit, you can see by his face that he hopes you will be a long, long time about it. He does not try to pass the time then, but sits down and lives.

Sì, pensavo io, la sua vita è di quelle che bisogna vivere due volte prima di poter dire che è stata veramente vissuta. Si può ripetere da capo un'arietta, ma non una composizione intera, una sinfonia e neanche una tragedia in cinque atti. Se la si ripete, vuol dire che non è andata come doveva.

In my native Denmark, literature seems to be a kind of all people’s Church - or its substitute. We all treat our Danish literature like a church. This is our true form of state religion, our contribution to the world’s variety, diversity and cultural wealth, our vivid and palpable contribution to the entire treasury box of the world and mankind. That's what the Danish literature is. For some of our more down-to-earth neighbours, the literature and literary exercises are merely means of communication, relaxation, amusement, but certainly, nothing that might be considered sacred. Not for us, the Danes. We didn’t happen to write “Hamlet”, but we all the more so revere Karen Blixen, Nikolai Grundtvig, Georg Brandes, Tove Ditlevsen. No wonder: the Vikings whom we also revere as our founding forefathers, were the first Danish writers. The first Danish writings are the Viking inscriptions in the Runic alphabet on raised stones – called “runestones” - that are still quite visible in the Danish landscape.

At the end of the movie version of Out of Africa, when Karen Blixen is leaving Kenya, she says, “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?” I always cry at that point, because I know exactly what she means.

Iš visų civilizacijos išradimų čiabuviai daugiausia vertina degtukus, dviratį ir šautuvą, jei jais žavisi, tačiau ir jų nedvejodami atsisakys, jei tik užeis kalba apie karvę.

La cura para todo siempre es el agua salada: el sudor, las lagrimas o el mar.

Frightened by something in her own nature

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Things are happening to you, and you feel them happening, but except for this one fact, you have no connection with them, and no key to the cause or meaning of them.

This strength, and love of life in them, to me seemed not only highly respectable, but glorious and bewitching.

Oh no,’ said the moon, ‘time means very little to me.

This woman, this Chef has the ability to transform a dinner into a kind of love affair, a love affair that makes no distinction between the bodily appetite and the spiritual appetite.

The relation between the white and black races in Africa in many ways resembles the relation between the two sexes. If the one of the two sexes were told that they did not play any greater part in the life of the other sex than this other sex plays within their own existence, they would be shocked and hurt. […] If they (white people) had been told that they played no more important part in the lives of the Natives than the Natives played in their own lives, they would have been highly indignant and ill at ease. If you had told the Natives that they played no greater part in the life of the white people than the white people played in their lives, they would never have believed you, but would have laughed at you. Probably in Natives circles, stories are passing about, and being repeated, which prove the all-absorbing interest of the white people in the Kikuyu or Kavirondo, and their complete dependence upon them.

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.

… and you, Marcus, have given me many things; now I shall give you this good advice. Be many people. Give up the game of being always Marcus Cocoza. You have worried too much about Marcus Cocoza, so that you have been really his slave and prisoner. You have not done anything without first considering how it would affect Marcus Cocoza’s happiness and prestige. You were always much afraid that Marcus might do a stupid thing, or be bored. What would it really have mattered? All over the world people are doing stupid things… I should like you to be easy, your little heart to be light again. You must from now, be more than one, many people, as many as you can think of…

No,” he said after a pause, “the true art of the gods is the comic. The comic is a condescension of the divine to the world of man; it is the sublime vision, which cannot be studied, but must ever be celestially granted. In the comic the gods see their own being reflected as in a mirror, and while the tragic poet is bound by strict laws, they will allow the comic artist a freedom as unlimited as their own. They do not even withhold their own existence from his sports. Jove may favor Lucianos of Samosata. As long as your mockery is in true godly taste you may mock at the gods and still remain a sound devotee. But in pitying, or condoling with your god, you deny and annihilate him, and such is the most horrible of atheisms.

Когда вы забираете у людей землю, вы лишаете их не только родной земли. Вы отнимаете у них прошлое, обрубаете корни, лишаете их лица. Отнимая у них то, что они привыкли видеть, то, что они ожидают увидеть, вы могли бы заодно, образно говоря, отнять у них и глаза. Это в большей степени относится к примитивням народам, чем к цивилизованным, ведь даже животные стремятся обратно в знакомые места, преодолевая громадные расстояния, пренебрегая опасностями и страданиями, только бы вернуть себе потерянное самосознание, свое лицо.

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.

Hard and cruel though it may seem," said the Cardinal, "yet we, who hold our high office as keepers and watchmen to the story, may tell you, verily, that to its human characters there is salvation in nothing else in the universe. If you tell them -- you compassionate and accommodating human readers -- that they may bring their distress and anguish before any other authority, you will be cruelly deceiving and mocking them. For within our whole universe the story only has authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: 'Who am I?

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 air in Africa is more significant in the landscape than in Europe, it is filled with loomings and mirages, and is in a way the real stage of activities. In the heat of the midday the air oscillates and vibrates like the string of a violin, lifts up long layers of grass-land with thorn-trees and hills on it, and creates vast silvery expanses of water in the dry grass.

I had now also got to deal with the fate of my horses and my dogs... In the end I decided to give them to my friends. I rode in to Nairobi on my favourite horse, Rouge, going very slowly and looking round to the North, and the South. It was a very strange thing to Rouge, I thought, to be going in by the Nairobi road, and not to be coming back. I installed him, with some trouble, in the horse-van of the Naivasha train, I stood in the van and felt, for the last time, his silky muzzle against my hands and my face. I will not let thee go, Rouge, except thou bless me. We had found together the riding-path down to the river amongst the Native shambas and huts, on the steep slippery descent he had walked as nimbly as a mule, and in the brown running river-water I had seen my own head and his close together. May you now, in a valley of clouds, eat carnations to the right and stock to the left.

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.

We of the present day, who love our machines, cannot quite imagine how people in the old days could live without them. But we could not make the Athanasian Creed, or the technique of the Mass, or of a five-act tragedy, and perhaps not even of a sonnet. And if we had not found them there ready for our use, we should have had to do without them. Still we must imagine, since they have been made at all, that there was a time when the hearts of humanity cried out for those things, and when a deeply felt want was relieved when they were made.

Как-то одна старая дама, сидя в кругу друзей, рассуждала о своей жизни. Она заявила во всеуслышание, что готова заново прожить свою жизнь, и, как видно считала это доказательством того, что ее жизнь прожита не зря. Мне подумалось: ведь у нее была такая жизнь, которую и вправду надо прожить два раза, чтобы испробовать, иначе ее и жизнью не назовёшь. Можно спеть на бис короткую арию, но нельзя повторить всю оперу - как и целую симфонию или пятиактовую трагедию. И если приходится повторять, значит, в первый раз ее сыграли из рук вон плохо.

¿Es voluntad del Señor que la humanidad no pueda ser feliz, sino que anhele siempre cosas que no tiene, y que, tal vez, no se encuentran en ninguna parte? Los animales y los pájaros viven a gusto en este mundo. ¿No puede ser, entonces, igual de bueno para los seres humanos a los que Dios ha puesto en él: los campesinos que se quejan de su duro destino, los grandes señores que nunca tienen bastante, y los jóvenes sacerdotes que añoran el paraíso en los bosques verdes? ¿No podría el hombre (no podría, al menos, uno de todos ellos) estar en tal relación con el Señor como para decirle: «He resuelto el enigma de nuestra vida, he hecho este mundo mío, y soy feliz en él»?

Là est la différence entre toi et moi. Le monde où tu vis est éclairé par tous les côtés par ta présence en son centre; mais moi il faut que je frotte chaque fois une allumette pour que l'humanité voie ma figure.

February 13: On its cover Se Og Hor (Denmark) features a shot of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) and Marilyn (dressed in a fur stole and low-cut dress) smiling over a large manuscript.

If there were one more thing I could do, it would be to go on safari again.

A história de um galante "Sempre pensei que é uma injustiça para a mulher não ter estado nunca sozinha no mundo. Adão pôde, por um tempo, muito ou pouco, caminhar sobre uma terra jovem e serena, entre os animais, na posse inteira da sua alma, e a maioria dos homens nasce ainda com a memória desse tempo. Mas a pobre Eva, essa, já o encontrou a ele, reclamando-a para si, no momento em que abriu os olhos para o mundo. E isto nunca perdoou a mulher ao Criador: ela sente-se com o direito a reaver para si própria esse tempo no Paraíso. Só que, para sua pouca sorte, ao perseguir-se um tempo já passado, sempre o apanhamos de raspão e pelo avesso.

O poeta "Para um campónio dinamarquês do seu tipo a ideia de acabar com a vida não custa a conceber. A vida nunca lhes parece - nem é, de resto - uma grande maravilha, e o suicídio, seja por que forma for,é, digamos, a sua maneira natural de morrer.(...) Ele sentira o destino comum dos seus iguais, que é ser, como se feitos de matéria essencialmente diferente do resto da humanidade, invisível para os outros.

Up in this high 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. •   KAREN BLIXEN, Out of Africa

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. —Isak Dinesen (1885–1962) Pen name of Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke

¿Qué pasaría si vuestro Luis Felipe dijera al vernos a nosotros tan a gusto en el infierno: Esto es una farsa, un engaño. Esta gente ha estado en el infierno desde su nacimiento.?

Words from Karen Blixen's book, Out of Africa, subsequently play over and over in my mind: 'If I know a song of Africa ... does Africa know a song of me?... would the eagles of Ngong look out for me? Will Hwange's bateleur eagles keep looking out for me?