Karen Blixen Quotes
April 17, 1885 – September 7, 1962
More Karen Blixen Quotes
The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.
Karen Blixen— As quoted in Reader's Digest (April 1964)
— Variant: I know a cure for everything. Salt water ... in one form or another, sweat, tears or the salt sea.
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.
Karen Blixen— "The Old Chevalier" (1934)
I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain at Ngong.
Karen Blixen— Letter to her mother (26 February 1919)
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.
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.
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
Karen Blixen— As quoted in The Human Condition (1958) by Hannah Arendt. This appears as part of a statement in a 1957 interview where she speaks of a friend's comments about her:I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller. One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue. To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.Interview with Bent Mohn in The New York Times Book Review (3 November 1957)
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.
Karen Blixen— Shadows on the Grass (1960)
God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.
Karen Blixen— As quoted in obituaries (7 September 1962)
"Do you know a cure for me?" "Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water." "Salt water?" I asked him. "Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea."
Karen Blixen— "The Deluge at Norderney"
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!
Karen Blixen— Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (1971)
Real art must always involve some witchcraft.
Karen Blixen— Letters from Africa: 1914-1931 (1981) edited by Frans Lasson, translated by Anne Born.
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.
Karen Blixen— As quoted in Voices: A Memoir (1983) by Frederic Prokosch
The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.
Karen Blixen— On Modern Marriage and Other Observations (1986)
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.
Karen Blixen— As quoted in Journey Through Womanhood: Meditations from Our Collective Soul (2002) by Tian Dayton
"Do you know a cure for me?" "Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water." "Salt water?" I asked him. "Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea."
Karen Blixen— "The Deluge at Norderney"
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.
Karen Blixen— "The Deluge at Norderney"
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?
Karen Blixen— "The Deluge at Norderney"
My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady...
Karen Blixen— "The Old Chevalier"
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?
Karen Blixen— "The Dreamers"
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.
Karen Blixen— Out of Africa, first lines (1937)
Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker's mind.
Karen Blixen— "The Invincible Slave-owners"
Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.
Karen Blixen— "A Consolatory Tale"
It never has happened, and it never will happen, and that is why it is told.
Karen Blixen— "The Immortal Story"
'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!'
Karen Blixen— "The Cardinal's First Tale"
The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
Karen Blixen— "The Cardinal's Third Tale"
