.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
Rommy was the beloved dog of Karen Isak Dinesen Blixen.
He was a German Shepard, born in Africa and given to her by a friend.
His 13 birthday was celebrated with a party. The 'birthday boy' sat at the table surrounded by his presents and the 'two-footed' guests drank hot chocolate, one of his mommy's favorite treats.
A few weeks later he and his mistress, the Baroness Blixen, went for a walk around the dam on her farm in Denmark. That was as far as the old dog could go.
He died at the end of March.
When there was nothing else the veterinarioan could do for him, his mistress clipped a lock of his hair as a keep-sake of her beloved dog and had him put to sleep.
Karen had him buried on Ewald's Hill near the site of what would one day become the place of her own gravesite.
He was, she once said, the most lovable and faithful creature she had ever owned.
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
http://reslater.blogspot.com/2014/01/karen-blixen-isak-dinesen-biography.html
http://reslater.blogspot.com/2014/01/karen-blixen-isak-dinesen-biography.html
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"The cure for anything is salt water - tears, sweat, or the sea."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"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."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"To be a person is to have a story to tell."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Here I am, where I am supposed to be."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"There was a place in the Hills, on the first ridge in the Game Reserve, that I myself at the time when I thought that I was to live and die in Africa, had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: "Let us drive as far as our graves."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I will not let thee go, except thou bless me."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I don't think...
one gets a flash of happiness once,
and never again;
it is there deep within you..."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my "life has been wasted" here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Alas! as I have lived I have lost the capacity of fear. When you know what things are really like, you can make no poems about them. When you have had talk with ghosts and connections with the devils you are, in the end, more afraid of your creditors than of them; and when you have been made a cuckold you are no longer nervous about cuckoldry. I have become too familiar with life; it can no longer delude me into believing that one thing is much worse than the other. The day and the dark, an enemy and a friend—I know them to be about the same. How can you make others afraid when you have forgotten fear yourself? I once had a really tragic tale, a great tale, full of agony, immensely popular, of a young man who in the end had his nose and his ears cut off. Now I could frighten no one with it, if I wanted to, for now I know that to be without them is not so very much worse than to have them. This is why you see me here, skin and bone, and dressed in old rags instead of keeping near the thrones of the mighty, flourishing and flattered, as was when I was young."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I remember an old Danish bishop's saying to me that there are many ways to the recognition of truth, and that Burgundy is one of them."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent. In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing. The grass was me , and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorn trees."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I had a farm in Africa."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"It is terrible and unbearable to an artist,' he said, 'to be encouraged to do, to be applauded for doing his second best.' He said: 'Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!"
- Isak Dinesen, Babette's Feast
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"People love to be frightened. The great princes, fed up with the sweets of life, wished to have their blood stirred again. The honest ladies, to whom nothing ever happened, longed to tremble in their beds just for once. The dancers were inspired to a lighter pace by tales of flight and pursuit."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself—all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"At times I believe that my feet have been set upon a road which I shall go on following, and that slowly the centre of gravity of my being will shift over from the world of day, from the domain of organizing and regulating universal powers, into the world of Imagination. Already now I feel...that day is a space of time without meaning, and that it is with the coming of dusk, with the lighting of the first star and the first candle, that things will become what they really are, and will come forth to meet me."
- Isak Dinesen, Shadows On The Grass
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Emmanuelson said good-bye to me; he started to walk, and then came back and said good-bye once more. I sat in the car and watched him, and I think that as he went he was pleased to have a spectator. I believe that the dramatic instinct within him was so strong that he was at this moment vividly aware of being leaving the stage, of disappearing, as if he had, with the eyes of his audience, seen himself go. Exit Emmanuelson. Should not the hills, the thorn-trees and the dusty road take pity and for a second put on the aspect of cardboard?"
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"What is life when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent, accurately set, infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful puppies into old mangy blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags, and succulent young boys, to whom the world holds great delights and terrors, into old weak men, with running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn?"
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"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? You may even ask which is the more intense craving and pleasure: to drink or to make water. But in the meantime, what has been done? A song has been composed, a kiss taken, a slanderer slain, a prophet begotten, a righteous judgment given, a joke made. The world drank in the young story-teller Mira. He went to its head, he ran in its veins, he made it glow with warmth and color. Now I am on my way down a little; the effect has worn off. The world will soon be equally pleased to piss me out again, and I do not know but that I am pressing on a little myself. But the tales which I made—they shall last."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places."
- Isak Dinesen, Letters from Africa, 1914-1931
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Man, my friends,is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble. We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!"
- Isak Dinesen, Babette's Feast
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings"
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"If Miss Malin had now been given the choice of returning to her former reasonable state, and had been capable of realizing the meaning of the offer, she might have declined it on the ground that you have in reality more fun out of life when a little off your head."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"You know you are truly alive when you're living among lions."
- Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.
Ha, ha, quoth he, full plain I see
The Devil knows how to row.
Farewell, farewell, but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest:
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast."
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
A SHROPSHIRE LAD: XIX TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG
by A. E. Housman (1859-1936).
"The time you won your town the race
We cheered you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high...
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose...
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man...
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's."
"Now take back the soul
of Denys George Finch Hatton,
whom You have shared with us.
He brought us joy...
we loved him well.
He was not ours.
He was not mine."
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
From Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), chapter titled "Kamante and Lulu," page 83:
"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"
~ Out of Africa ~
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
Denys Finch Hatton 14796219
Rommy was the beloved dog of Karen Isak Dinesen Blixen.
He was a German Shepard, born in Africa and given to her by a friend.
His 13 birthday was celebrated with a party. The 'birthday boy' sat at the table surrounded by his presents and the 'two-footed' guests drank hot chocolate, one of his mommy's favorite treats.
A few weeks later he and his mistress, the Baroness Blixen, went for a walk around the dam on her farm in Denmark. That was as far as the old dog could go.
He died at the end of March.
When there was nothing else the veterinarioan could do for him, his mistress clipped a lock of his hair as a keep-sake of her beloved dog and had him put to sleep.
Karen had him buried on Ewald's Hill near the site of what would one day become the place of her own gravesite.
He was, she once said, the most lovable and faithful creature she had ever owned.
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
http://reslater.blogspot.com/2014/01/karen-blixen-isak-dinesen-biography.html
http://reslater.blogspot.com/2014/01/karen-blixen-isak-dinesen-biography.html
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"The cure for anything is salt water - tears, sweat, or the sea."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"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."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"To be a person is to have a story to tell."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Here I am, where I am supposed to be."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"There was a place in the Hills, on the first ridge in the Game Reserve, that I myself at the time when I thought that I was to live and die in Africa, had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: "Let us drive as far as our graves."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I will not let thee go, except thou bless me."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I don't think...
one gets a flash of happiness once,
and never again;
it is there deep within you..."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my "life has been wasted" here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Alas! as I have lived I have lost the capacity of fear. When you know what things are really like, you can make no poems about them. When you have had talk with ghosts and connections with the devils you are, in the end, more afraid of your creditors than of them; and when you have been made a cuckold you are no longer nervous about cuckoldry. I have become too familiar with life; it can no longer delude me into believing that one thing is much worse than the other. The day and the dark, an enemy and a friend—I know them to be about the same. How can you make others afraid when you have forgotten fear yourself? I once had a really tragic tale, a great tale, full of agony, immensely popular, of a young man who in the end had his nose and his ears cut off. Now I could frighten no one with it, if I wanted to, for now I know that to be without them is not so very much worse than to have them. This is why you see me here, skin and bone, and dressed in old rags instead of keeping near the thrones of the mighty, flourishing and flattered, as was when I was young."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I remember an old Danish bishop's saying to me that there are many ways to the recognition of truth, and that Burgundy is one of them."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent. In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing. The grass was me , and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorn trees."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I had a farm in Africa."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"It is terrible and unbearable to an artist,' he said, 'to be encouraged to do, to be applauded for doing his second best.' He said: 'Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!"
- Isak Dinesen, Babette's Feast
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"People love to be frightened. The great princes, fed up with the sweets of life, wished to have their blood stirred again. The honest ladies, to whom nothing ever happened, longed to tremble in their beds just for once. The dancers were inspired to a lighter pace by tales of flight and pursuit."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself—all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"At times I believe that my feet have been set upon a road which I shall go on following, and that slowly the centre of gravity of my being will shift over from the world of day, from the domain of organizing and regulating universal powers, into the world of Imagination. Already now I feel...that day is a space of time without meaning, and that it is with the coming of dusk, with the lighting of the first star and the first candle, that things will become what they really are, and will come forth to meet me."
- Isak Dinesen, Shadows On The Grass
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Emmanuelson said good-bye to me; he started to walk, and then came back and said good-bye once more. I sat in the car and watched him, and I think that as he went he was pleased to have a spectator. I believe that the dramatic instinct within him was so strong that he was at this moment vividly aware of being leaving the stage, of disappearing, as if he had, with the eyes of his audience, seen himself go. Exit Emmanuelson. Should not the hills, the thorn-trees and the dusty road take pity and for a second put on the aspect of cardboard?"
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"What is life when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent, accurately set, infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful puppies into old mangy blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags, and succulent young boys, to whom the world holds great delights and terrors, into old weak men, with running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn?"
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"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? You may even ask which is the more intense craving and pleasure: to drink or to make water. But in the meantime, what has been done? A song has been composed, a kiss taken, a slanderer slain, a prophet begotten, a righteous judgment given, a joke made. The world drank in the young story-teller Mira. He went to its head, he ran in its veins, he made it glow with warmth and color. Now I am on my way down a little; the effect has worn off. The world will soon be equally pleased to piss me out again, and I do not know but that I am pressing on a little myself. But the tales which I made—they shall last."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places."
- Isak Dinesen, Letters from Africa, 1914-1931
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Man, my friends,is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble. We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!"
- Isak Dinesen, Babette's Feast
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings"
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"If Miss Malin had now been given the choice of returning to her former reasonable state, and had been capable of realizing the meaning of the offer, she might have declined it on the ground that you have in reality more fun out of life when a little off your head."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"You know you are truly alive when you're living among lions."
- Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.
Ha, ha, quoth he, full plain I see
The Devil knows how to row.
Farewell, farewell, but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest:
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast."
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
A SHROPSHIRE LAD: XIX TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG
by A. E. Housman (1859-1936).
"The time you won your town the race
We cheered you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high...
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose...
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man...
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's."
"Now take back the soul
of Denys George Finch Hatton,
whom You have shared with us.
He brought us joy...
we loved him well.
He was not ours.
He was not mine."
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
From Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), chapter titled "Kamante and Lulu," page 83:
"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"
~ Out of Africa ~
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
Denys Finch Hatton 14796219
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
Rommy was the beloved dog of Karen Isak Dinesen Blixen.
He was a German Shepard, born in Africa and given to her by a friend.
His 13 birthday was celebrated with a party. The 'birthday boy' sat at the table surrounded by his presents and the 'two-footed' guests drank hot chocolate, one of his mommy's favorite treats.
A few weeks later he and his mistress, the Baroness Blixen, went for a walk around the dam on her farm in Denmark. That was as far as the old dog could go.
He died at the end of March.
When there was nothing else the veterinarioan could do for him, his mistress clipped a lock of his hair as a keep-sake of her beloved dog and had him put to sleep.
Karen had him buried on Ewald's Hill near the site of what would one day become the place of her own gravesite.
He was, she once said, the most lovable and faithful creature she had ever owned.
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
http://reslater.blogspot.com/2014/01/karen-blixen-isak-dinesen-biography.html
http://reslater.blogspot.com/2014/01/karen-blixen-isak-dinesen-biography.html
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"The cure for anything is salt water - tears, sweat, or the sea."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"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."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"To be a person is to have a story to tell."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Here I am, where I am supposed to be."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"There was a place in the Hills, on the first ridge in the Game Reserve, that I myself at the time when I thought that I was to live and die in Africa, had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: "Let us drive as far as our graves."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I will not let thee go, except thou bless me."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I don't think...
one gets a flash of happiness once,
and never again;
it is there deep within you..."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my "life has been wasted" here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Alas! as I have lived I have lost the capacity of fear. When you know what things are really like, you can make no poems about them. When you have had talk with ghosts and connections with the devils you are, in the end, more afraid of your creditors than of them; and when you have been made a cuckold you are no longer nervous about cuckoldry. I have become too familiar with life; it can no longer delude me into believing that one thing is much worse than the other. The day and the dark, an enemy and a friend—I know them to be about the same. How can you make others afraid when you have forgotten fear yourself? I once had a really tragic tale, a great tale, full of agony, immensely popular, of a young man who in the end had his nose and his ears cut off. Now I could frighten no one with it, if I wanted to, for now I know that to be without them is not so very much worse than to have them. This is why you see me here, skin and bone, and dressed in old rags instead of keeping near the thrones of the mighty, flourishing and flattered, as was when I was young."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I remember an old Danish bishop's saying to me that there are many ways to the recognition of truth, and that Burgundy is one of them."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent. In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing. The grass was me , and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorn trees."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I had a farm in Africa."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"It is terrible and unbearable to an artist,' he said, 'to be encouraged to do, to be applauded for doing his second best.' He said: 'Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!"
- Isak Dinesen, Babette's Feast
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"People love to be frightened. The great princes, fed up with the sweets of life, wished to have their blood stirred again. The honest ladies, to whom nothing ever happened, longed to tremble in their beds just for once. The dancers were inspired to a lighter pace by tales of flight and pursuit."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself—all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"At times I believe that my feet have been set upon a road which I shall go on following, and that slowly the centre of gravity of my being will shift over from the world of day, from the domain of organizing and regulating universal powers, into the world of Imagination. Already now I feel...that day is a space of time without meaning, and that it is with the coming of dusk, with the lighting of the first star and the first candle, that things will become what they really are, and will come forth to meet me."
- Isak Dinesen, Shadows On The Grass
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Emmanuelson said good-bye to me; he started to walk, and then came back and said good-bye once more. I sat in the car and watched him, and I think that as he went he was pleased to have a spectator. I believe that the dramatic instinct within him was so strong that he was at this moment vividly aware of being leaving the stage, of disappearing, as if he had, with the eyes of his audience, seen himself go. Exit Emmanuelson. Should not the hills, the thorn-trees and the dusty road take pity and for a second put on the aspect of cardboard?"
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"What is life when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent, accurately set, infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful puppies into old mangy blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags, and succulent young boys, to whom the world holds great delights and terrors, into old weak men, with running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn?"
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"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? You may even ask which is the more intense craving and pleasure: to drink or to make water. But in the meantime, what has been done? A song has been composed, a kiss taken, a slanderer slain, a prophet begotten, a righteous judgment given, a joke made. The world drank in the young story-teller Mira. He went to its head, he ran in its veins, he made it glow with warmth and color. Now I am on my way down a little; the effect has worn off. The world will soon be equally pleased to piss me out again, and I do not know but that I am pressing on a little myself. But the tales which I made—they shall last."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places."
- Isak Dinesen, Letters from Africa, 1914-1931
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Man, my friends,is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble. We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!"
- Isak Dinesen, Babette's Feast
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings"
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"If Miss Malin had now been given the choice of returning to her former reasonable state, and had been capable of realizing the meaning of the offer, she might have declined it on the ground that you have in reality more fun out of life when a little off your head."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"You know you are truly alive when you're living among lions."
- Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.
Ha, ha, quoth he, full plain I see
The Devil knows how to row.
Farewell, farewell, but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest:
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast."
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
A SHROPSHIRE LAD: XIX TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG
by A. E. Housman (1859-1936).
"The time you won your town the race
We cheered you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high...
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose...
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man...
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's."
"Now take back the soul
of Denys George Finch Hatton,
whom You have shared with us.
He brought us joy...
we loved him well.
He was not ours.
He was not mine."
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
From Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), chapter titled "Kamante and Lulu," page 83:
"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"
~ Out of Africa ~
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
Denys Finch Hatton 14796219
Rommy was the beloved dog of Karen Isak Dinesen Blixen.
He was a German Shepard, born in Africa and given to her by a friend.
His 13 birthday was celebrated with a party. The 'birthday boy' sat at the table surrounded by his presents and the 'two-footed' guests drank hot chocolate, one of his mommy's favorite treats.
A few weeks later he and his mistress, the Baroness Blixen, went for a walk around the dam on her farm in Denmark. That was as far as the old dog could go.
He died at the end of March.
When there was nothing else the veterinarioan could do for him, his mistress clipped a lock of his hair as a keep-sake of her beloved dog and had him put to sleep.
Karen had him buried on Ewald's Hill near the site of what would one day become the place of her own gravesite.
He was, she once said, the most lovable and faithful creature she had ever owned.
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
http://reslater.blogspot.com/2014/01/karen-blixen-isak-dinesen-biography.html
http://reslater.blogspot.com/2014/01/karen-blixen-isak-dinesen-biography.html
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"The cure for anything is salt water - tears, sweat, or the sea."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"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."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"To be a person is to have a story to tell."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Here I am, where I am supposed to be."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"There was a place in the Hills, on the first ridge in the Game Reserve, that I myself at the time when I thought that I was to live and die in Africa, had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: "Let us drive as far as our graves."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I will not let thee go, except thou bless me."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I don't think...
one gets a flash of happiness once,
and never again;
it is there deep within you..."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my "life has been wasted" here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Alas! as I have lived I have lost the capacity of fear. When you know what things are really like, you can make no poems about them. When you have had talk with ghosts and connections with the devils you are, in the end, more afraid of your creditors than of them; and when you have been made a cuckold you are no longer nervous about cuckoldry. I have become too familiar with life; it can no longer delude me into believing that one thing is much worse than the other. The day and the dark, an enemy and a friend—I know them to be about the same. How can you make others afraid when you have forgotten fear yourself? I once had a really tragic tale, a great tale, full of agony, immensely popular, of a young man who in the end had his nose and his ears cut off. Now I could frighten no one with it, if I wanted to, for now I know that to be without them is not so very much worse than to have them. This is why you see me here, skin and bone, and dressed in old rags instead of keeping near the thrones of the mighty, flourishing and flattered, as was when I was young."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I remember an old Danish bishop's saying to me that there are many ways to the recognition of truth, and that Burgundy is one of them."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent. In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing. The grass was me , and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorn trees."
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"I had a farm in Africa."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"It is terrible and unbearable to an artist,' he said, 'to be encouraged to do, to be applauded for doing his second best.' He said: 'Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!"
- Isak Dinesen, Babette's Feast
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"People love to be frightened. The great princes, fed up with the sweets of life, wished to have their blood stirred again. The honest ladies, to whom nothing ever happened, longed to tremble in their beds just for once. The dancers were inspired to a lighter pace by tales of flight and pursuit."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself—all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married."
- Isak Dinesen
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"At times I believe that my feet have been set upon a road which I shall go on following, and that slowly the centre of gravity of my being will shift over from the world of day, from the domain of organizing and regulating universal powers, into the world of Imagination. Already now I feel...that day is a space of time without meaning, and that it is with the coming of dusk, with the lighting of the first star and the first candle, that things will become what they really are, and will come forth to meet me."
- Isak Dinesen, Shadows On The Grass
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"Emmanuelson said good-bye to me; he started to walk, and then came back and said good-bye once more. I sat in the car and watched him, and I think that as he went he was pleased to have a spectator. I believe that the dramatic instinct within him was so strong that he was at this moment vividly aware of being leaving the stage, of disappearing, as if he had, with the eyes of his audience, seen himself go. Exit Emmanuelson. Should not the hills, the thorn-trees and the dusty road take pity and for a second put on the aspect of cardboard?"
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
.♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥¸.•*¨*❀*¨*•.¸¸♥.
"What is life when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent, accurately set, infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful puppies into old mangy blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags, and succulent young boys, to whom the world holds great delights and terrors, into old weak men, with running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn?"
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
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"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? You may even ask which is the more intense craving and pleasure: to drink or to make water. But in the meantime, what has been done? A song has been composed, a kiss taken, a slanderer slain, a prophet begotten, a righteous judgment given, a joke made. The world drank in the young story-teller Mira. He went to its head, he ran in its veins, he made it glow with warmth and color. Now I am on my way down a little; the effect has worn off. The world will soon be equally pleased to piss me out again, and I do not know but that I am pressing on a little myself. But the tales which I made—they shall last."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
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"I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places."
- Isak Dinesen, Letters from Africa, 1914-1931
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"Man, my friends,is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble. We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!"
- Isak Dinesen, Babette's Feast
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"It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings"
- Isak Dinesen
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"If Miss Malin had now been given the choice of returning to her former reasonable state, and had been capable of realizing the meaning of the offer, she might have declined it on the ground that you have in reality more fun out of life when a little off your head."
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
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"You know you are truly alive when you're living among lions."
- Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
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Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.
Ha, ha, quoth he, full plain I see
The Devil knows how to row.
Farewell, farewell, but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest:
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast."
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A SHROPSHIRE LAD: XIX TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG
by A. E. Housman (1859-1936).
"The time you won your town the race
We cheered you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high...
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose...
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man...
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's."
"Now take back the soul
of Denys George Finch Hatton,
whom You have shared with us.
He brought us joy...
we loved him well.
He was not ours.
He was not mine."
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From Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), chapter titled "Kamante and Lulu," page 83:
"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"
~ Out of Africa ~
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Denys Finch Hatton 14796219
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