Karen Blixen Quotes

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.

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.

Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker's mind.

"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?"

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.

It is little silly to be a caricature of something of which you know very little, and which means very little to you, but to be your own caricature — that is the true carnival!

Frightened by something in her own nature

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.

A fashion always has some meaning. The fashion, or style, of renunciation really meant something then. It was inspired by the war, or it ran parallel to the war, and could not have been conceived without the war... It stood for the will to sacrifice — if the unlimited will to throw away can be called the will to sacrifice. It was arrogant and elegantly cynical — because it is arrogant and elegantly cynical when the symbol of the élite becomes hunger. The superfluous here threw away the necessary quite simply. In its inner essence it was the disdain of death.

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.

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.

¿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.?

It's an odd feeling-farewell-there is some envy in it. Men go off to be tested for courage and if we're tested at all, it's for patience, for doing without, for how well we can endure loneliness.

Nemcsak a földjüket vesszük el azoktól, akiktől a szülőföldjüket elvesszük. A múltjukat is, a gyökerüket, identitásukat. Ha elvesszük tőlük azon dolgokat, amiknek látását megszokták s amiknek látására a jővőben is számítanak, nyugodtan elvehetjük a szemük világát is. Ez fokozottabban érvényes a primitív népekre, mint a civilizáltakra, mert az állat is visszavándorol messziről, számtalan veszélyen és szenvedésen át, hogy meglelje elvesztett identitását abban a környezetben, amelyet ismer.

It was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet like the strong and refined essence of a continent... The views were immensely wide — everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.