Karen Blixen Quotes

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

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.

White people, who for a long time live alone with Natives, get into the habit of saying what they mean, because they have no reason or opportunity for dissimulation, and when they meet again their conversation keeps the Native tone.

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.

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.

A great artist is never poor.

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

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.

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

"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.

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

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.

"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?"

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.

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