Karen Blixen Quotes

One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.

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.

"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?"

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.

through the loveliness and power of her dream world she was now, in her old frock and botched shoes, very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth

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

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

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.

When soon I sail from here, I may again run into such a storm as the one in Kvasefjord. But this time I shall clearly understand that it is not a play in the theatre, but it is death. and it seems too that then, in the last moment before we go down, I can in in all truth be yours...

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.

Språket mangler ord for alt man ser og opplever når man flyr. Med tiden kommer man til å finne nye ord for disse inntrykkene.

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

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.

Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 — to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90.

Here I am, where I ought to be.