Karen Blixen: Trending quotes

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Karen Blixen: 134 quotes49 likes

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

On Modern Marriage and Other Observations (1986)

“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.”

Karen Blixen book Anecdotes of Destiny

"The Diver"
Anecdotes of Destiny (1953)

“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.”

Daguerreotypes and Other Essays (1979) This has also been abbreviated and quoted as "The will to sacrifice . . . was the disdain of death."

“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 book Seven Gothic Tales

"The Old Chevalier"
Seven Gothic Tales (1934)

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

Karen Blixen book Winter's Tales

"The Invincible Slave-owners"
Winter's Tales (1942)

“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.”

Shadows on the Grass (1960)

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

As quoted in obituaries (7 September 1962)