Karen Blixen

I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain at Ngong.

— Karen Blixen

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.

— Karen Blixen

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

— Karen Blixen

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.

— Karen Blixen

God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.

— Karen Blixen

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

— Karen Blixen

Isak Dinesen is also known for this quote.

— Karen Blixen

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!

— Karen Blixen

Real art must always involve some witchcraft.

— Karen Blixen

I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.

— Karen Blixen

The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.

— Karen Blixen

Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows that they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest.

— Karen Blixen

During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the role of the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity.

— Karen Blixen

God made the world, My Lord, and looked at it, and saw that it was good. Yes. But what if the world had looked back at him, to see whether he was good or not?

— Karen Blixen

I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch … and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order … by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery.

— Karen Blixen

My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady...

— Karen Blixen

Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine. A young man in love is essentially enraptured by the forces within himself.

— Karen Blixen

What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?

— Karen Blixen

The consolations of the vulgar are bitter in the royal ear. Let physicians and confectioners and servants in the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are. I have been told that lions, trapped and shut up in cages, grieve from shame more than from hunger.

— Karen Blixen

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.

— Karen Blixen

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.

— Karen Blixen

Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons nor divided the substance.

— Karen Blixen

In the Ngong Forest I have also seen, on a narrow path through thick growth, in the middle of a very hot day, the Giant Forest Hog, a rare person to meet.

— Karen Blixen

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.

— Karen Blixen

There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne — bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive.

— Karen Blixen

I had time after time watched the progression across the plain of the giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long stemmed spackled gigantic flowers slowly advancing. It was, in giant size, the border of a very old, infinitely precious Persian carpet in the dyes of green, yellow and black-brown

— Karen Blixen

The true aristocracy and the true proletariat of the world are both in understanding with tragedy. To them it is the fundamental principle of God, and the key, the minor key, to existence. They differ in this way from the bourgeoisie of all classes, who deny tragedy, who will not tolerate it, and to whom the word tragedy means in itself unpleasantness.

— Karen Blixen

In a foreign country and with foreign species of life one should take measures to find out whether things will be keeping their value when dead. To settlers I give this advice: "For the sake of your eyes and hearts, shoot not the Iguana."

— Karen Blixen

Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.

— Karen Blixen

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

— Karen Blixen

Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.

— Karen Blixen

I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser...

— Karen Blixen

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...

— Karen Blixen

It never has happened, and it never will happen, and that is why it is told.

— Karen Blixen

'Are you sure,' she asked, 'that it is God whom you serve?' 'That,' he said, 'that, Madame, is a risk which the artists and the priests of this world have to run!'

— Karen Blixen

The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.

— Karen Blixen

Why, you are to become a story teller, and I shall give you the reasons! Hear then: Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a small snotty lass understands it or not.

— Karen Blixen

God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.

— Karen Blixen