Isak Dinesen
You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.Collection: Wise
I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.Collection: Suffering
Here I am, where I am supposed to be.Collection: Here I Am
To be a person is to have a story to tell.Collection: Stories
Nobody has seen the trekking birds take their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or rivers break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.Collection: Running
What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?--Experience, old people's experience.Collection: People
If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages.Collection: Animal
If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?Collection: Song
"Do you know a cure for me?" Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water." Salt water?" I asked him. Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea".Collection: Sea
To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.Collection: Patterns
I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart.Collection: Heart
There are many ways to the recognition of truth, and Burgundy is one of them.Collection: Wine
The divine art is the story.Collection: Art
A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.Collection: Reality
You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.Collection: Travel
I do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at one time or another, been up on a broomstick.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Loneliness
Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Country
But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.Collection: Fate
Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.Collection: Country
In Africa, when you pick up a book worth reading, out of the deadly consignments which good ships are always being made to carry out all the way from Europe, you read it as an author would like his book to be read, praying to God that he may have it in him to go on as beautifully as he has begun. Your mind runs, transported, upon a fresh deep green track.Collection: Running
It is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flier is the flight itself. . . Every time I have gone up in an aeroplane and looked down have realized I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a new discovery. "I see:" I have thought, "This was the idea. And now I understand everything."Collection: Discovery
There is something strangely determinate and fatal about a single shot in the night. It is as if someone had cried a message to you in one word, and would not repeat it.Collection: Night
There are times of great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist of the drizzling rain.Collection: Rain
And I had by now become used to the idea of witchcraft, it seemed a reasonable thing, so many things are about, at night, in Africa.Collection: Night
While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.Collection: Failure
I do not see eye to eye with the camera.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Rare Person
Within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: "Who am I?"Collection: Heart
It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.Collection: Speak
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.Collection: Voice
I beg of you, you good people who want to hear stories told: look at this page and recognize the wisdom of my grandmother and of all old story-telling women!Collection: Grandmother
For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.Collection: Suicide
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 earthCollection: Dream
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!Collection: Silly
There was a place in the Hills, on the first ridge in the Game Reserve, that I myself at the time when I thought that I was to live and die in Africa, had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: "Let us drive as far as our graves.Collection: Games
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.Collection: Running
some travelers are drawn forward by a goal lying before them in the way iron is drawn to the magnet. Others are driven on by a force lying behind them. In such a way the bowstring makes the arrow fly.Collection: Travel
I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.Collection: Country
Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.Collection: Truth
Where a pack of monkeys had traveled over the road, the smell of them lingered for a long time in the air, a dry and stale, mousy smell.Collection: Smell
In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself-all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married.Collection: Strong
Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker's mind.Collection: Mind
death - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Believe
There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concernedCollection: Concerned
My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady.Collection: Humble
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.Collection: Two