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Karen Blixen citations
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La baronne Karen von Blixen-Finecke, née Karen Christentze Dinesen, et connue sous son pseudonyme d'Isak Dinesen est une femme de lettres danoise, célèbre pour avoir écrit La Ferme africaine dont est tiré le film Out of Africa : Souvenirs d'Afrique et Anecdotes du destin dont une nouvelle sert de base au film Le Festin de Babette.

✵ 17. avril 1885 – 7. septembre 1962
Karen Blixen photo
Karen Blixen: 70 citations0 J'aime

Karen Blixen citations célèbres

“J'ai possédé une ferme en Afrique au pied du Ngong. La ligne de l'équateur passait dans les montagnes à vingt-cinq milles au nord; mais nous étions à deux mille mètres. Au milieu de la journée nous avions l'impression d'être tout près du soleil, alors que les après-midi et les soirées étaient fraîches et les nuits froides.”

Karen Blixen

La ferme africaine

“Là est la différence entre toi et moi. Le monde où tu vis est éclairé par tous les côtés par ta présence en son centre; mais moi il faut que je frotte chaque fois une allumette pour que l'humanité voie ma figure.”

Karen Blixen

Saison à Copenhague

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“Tu ne peux pas changer le passé, mais tu peux détruire le présent en te souciant du futur.”

Karen Blixen

Karen Blixen: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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Karen Blixen livre Out of Africa

Out of Africa (1937)
Contexte: 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.

“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.”

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Karen Blixen

As quoted in Journey Through Womanhood: Meditations from Our Collective Soul (2002) by Tian Dayton

“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.”

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Karen Blixen

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

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Karen Blixen

Source: Babette's Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny

“our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.”

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Karen Blixen

Source: Babette's Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny

“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.”

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Karen Blixen livre Out of Africa

Source: Out of Africa

“The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.”

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Karen Blixen livre Out of Africa

Source: Out of Africa

“I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser…”

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Karen Blixen livre Anecdotes of Destiny

Anecdotes of Destiny (1953)

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

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Karen Blixen livre Seven Gothic Tales

"The Old Chevalier"
Seven Gothic Tales (1934)

“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."”

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Karen Blixen livre Out of Africa

Out of Africa (1937)

“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.”

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Karen Blixen livre Seven Gothic Tales

"The Old Chevalier"
Seven Gothic Tales (1934)

“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?”

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Karen Blixen livre Seven Gothic Tales

"The Dreamers"
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?”

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Karen Blixen livre Seven Gothic Tales

"The Deluge at Norderney"
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.”

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Karen Blixen livre Winter's Tales

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

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

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Karen Blixen livre 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.”

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Karen Blixen

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

“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!”

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Karen Blixen

Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (1971)

“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.”

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Karen Blixen livre Seven Gothic Tales

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

“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!”

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Karen Blixen livre 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."”

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Karen Blixen livre Out of Africa

Out of Africa (1937)

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

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Karen Blixen livre 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.”

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Karen Blixen livre Out of Africa

Out of Africa (1937)

“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.”

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Karen Blixen

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

“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”

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Karen Blixen livre Out of Africa

Out of Africa (1937)

“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.”

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Karen Blixen livre Out of Africa

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.”

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Karen Blixen livre Out of Africa

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…”

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Karen Blixen livre Anecdotes of Destiny

"Tempests"
Anecdotes of Destiny (1953)

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