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Karen Blixen
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„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.“
„Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.“
„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!“
„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.“
„The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.“
„Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker’s mind.“
„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.“
„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.“
„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?“
„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.“
„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…“
„I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser…“
„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.“
„My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady…“
„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.”“
„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.“
„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?“
„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.“
„The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.“
„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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