Quotes by Isak Dinesen

“I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open to them.”

“I am a woman in process. Im just trying like everybody else. I try to take every conflict, every experience, and learn from it. Life is never dull.”

“Women are the real architects of society.”

“Theres a lot more to being a woman than being a mother, but theres a hell a lot more to being a mother than most people suspect”

“Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time”

“Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever...”

“The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea”

“When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I dont 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.”

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

“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.”

“But the trouble is not as you think now, that we have put up obstacles too high for you to jump . . . . It is that we have put up no obstacles at all. The great strength is in you . . .”

“Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.”

“A great artist is never poor.”

“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.”