Karen Blixen Quotes

… 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…

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

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.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A great artist is never poor.

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.

Here I am, where I ought to be.

'Are you sure,' she asked, 'that it is God whom you serve?' The Cardinal looked up, met her eyes and smiled very gently. 'That,' he said, 'that, Madame, is a risk which the artists and the priests of this world have to run!'

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.