Karen Blixen: Trending quotes

“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.”

Out of Africa (1937)

“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?”

"The Old Chevalier"
Seven Gothic Tales (1934)

“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?”

"The Dreamers"
Seven Gothic Tales (1934)

“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.”

"The Deluge at Norderney"
Seven Gothic Tales (1934)

Karen Blixen book Winter's Tales

"Sorrow-Acre"
Winter's Tales (1942)

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

Karen Blixen book Last Tales

"The Cardinal's Third Tale"
Last Tales (1957)

“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.”

“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!”

As quoted in Voices: A Memoir (1983) by Frederic Prokosch

“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.”

Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (1971)

“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!”

"The Deluge at Norderney"
Seven Gothic Tales (1934)

Karen Blixen book Last Tales

"The Cardinal's First Tale"
Last Tales (1957)

“Often since I have, in some sort, shot an Iguana, and have remembered that one in the reserve. Up at Meru I saw a young Native girl with a bracelet on, a leather strap two inches wide, and all embroidered over with very small turquoise-coloured beads which varied little in colour and played in green, light blue and ultra-marine. It was an extraordinarily live thing; it seemed to draw breath on her arm, so that I wanted it for myself, and made Farah buy it from her. No sooner had it come upon my arm that it gave up the ghost. It was nothing now, a small, cheap, purchased article of finery. It had been the play of colors, the duet between the turquoise and the "negre", — that quick, sweet, brownish black, like peat and black pottery, of the Native's skin, — that had created the life of the bracelet. …I stood in Meru and looked at my pale hand and the dead bracelet, it was as if an injustice had been done to a noble thing, as if truth had been suppressed. So sad did it seem that I remembered the saying of the hero in a book that I had read as a child: "I have conquered them all, but I am standing amongst graves."”

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

Out of Africa (1937)

Karen Blixen book Winter's Tales

"A Consolatory Tale"
Winter's Tales (1942)

“I have sometimes come upon the Iguana, the big lizard, as they were sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a river-bed. They are not pretty in shape, but nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their colouring. They shine like a heap of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window. When, as you approach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green and purple over the stones, the color seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet's luminous tail.
Once I shot an Iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten. As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal, which had radiated out all that glow and splendor. Now that the flame was put out, and the soul had flown, the Iguana was as dead as a sandbag.”

“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.”

Out of Africa (1937)

“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”

Letter to her sister Elle (1923); later published in Letters from Africa: 1914-1931 (1981) edited by Frans Lasson, translated by Anne Born.

“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.”

Out of Africa (1937)

“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.”

Out of Africa (1937)

“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…”

Out of Africa (1937)

Karen Blixen book Anecdotes of Destiny

"Tempests"
Anecdotes of Destiny (1953)

“Isak Dinesen is also known for this quote.”