Karen Blixen - Time Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

View all Karen Blixen Quotes
I had time after time watched the progression across the plain of the giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long stemmed spackled gigantic flowers slowly advancing. It was, in giant size, the border of a very old, infinitely precious Persian carpet in the dyes of green, yellow and black-brown

Karen Blixen
I always have a difficult time making them believe that I intend everything as it's stated.

Karen Blixen
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.

Karen Blixen
I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart.

Karen Blixen
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.

Karen Blixen
Of what happened later in the evening nothing definite can here be stated. None of the guests later on had any clear remembrance of it. They only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had blended into one glorious radiance. Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity. Long after midnight the windows of the house shone like gold, and golden song flowed out into the winter air.

Karen Blixen
Upon the library shelves tall tomes, with their backs to the world, preserved the ponderous knowledge of ages. But from time to time during three centuries, volumes of more frivolous thoughts, of longing and levity and words that rhymed, had happened to leap in amongst them.

Karen Blixen
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
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.

Karen Blixen
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.

Karen Blixen
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.

Karen Blixen
But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.

Karen Blixen
I think Marilyn is bound to make an almost overwhelming impression on the people who meet her for the first time. It is not that she is pretty, although she is of course almost incredibly pretty, but she radiates, at the same time, unbounded vitality and a kind of unbelievable innocence. I have met the same in a lion-cub, which my native servants in Africa brought me. I would not keep her, since I felt that it would in some way be wrong... I shall never forget the almost overpowering feeling of unconquerable strength and sweetness which she conveyed. I had all the wild nature of Africa amicably gazing at me with mighty playfulness.

Karen Blixen
I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.

Karen Blixen
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...

Karen Blixen
It is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flier is the flight itself... Every time I have gone up in an aeroplane and looked down have realized I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a new discovery. "I see:" I have thought, "This was the idea. And now I understand everything."

Karen Blixen
Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.

Karen Blixen
White people, who for a long time live alone with Natives, get into the habit of saying what they mean, because they have no reason or opportunity for dissimulation, and when they meet again their conversation keeps the Native tone.

Karen Blixen
When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.

Karen Blixen