179 Quotes by Isak Dinesen

When we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear. But we have also an unconquerable faith in our own stars, and in the impossibility of anything venturing to go against us. As we grow old we slowly come to believe that everything will turn out badly for us, and that failure is in the nature of things, but then we do not much mind what happens to us one way or the other. In this way a balance is obtained.

If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages ...

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.

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.

If there were one more thing I could do, it would be to go on safari once again.

death - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.

I do not see eye to eye with the camera.

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.

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.