Karen Blixen - Seven Gothic Tales (1934)

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It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.

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
Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous solution. Be brave, be brave.

Karen Blixen
Some people have an unconquerable love of riddles. They may have the chance of listening to plain sense, or to such wisdom that explains life; but no, they must go and work their brains over a riddle, just because they do not understand what it means.

Karen Blixen
While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.

Karen Blixen
Your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet,... into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and appears to be, in some way, the truth about you. Even a flattering picture is... a lie.

Karen Blixen
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
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
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.

Karen Blixen
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
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
Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the word of the Lord is to the soul.

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
Dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.

Karen Blixen
What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused? — Experience, old people's experience.

Karen Blixen
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?

Karen Blixen
The consolations of the vulgar are bitter in the royal ear. Let physicians and confectioners and servants in the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are. I have been told that lions, trapped and shut up in cages, grieve from shame more than from hunger.

Karen Blixen
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.

Karen Blixen
My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady...

Karen Blixen
That old saying which the peasants call the bachelors' prayer: "I pray thee, good Lord, that I may not be married. But if I am to be married, that I may not be a cuckold. But if I am to be a cuckold, that I may not know. But if I am to know, that I may not mind."

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

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

Karen Blixen
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.

Karen Blixen