A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the Paris Angelou.

— Karen Blixen

Come now and let us go and risk our lives unnecessarily. For if they have got any value at all it is this that they gave got none. Free left we Steuben Kane.

— Karen Blixen

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

Dr Sass…maintained that in paradise, until the time of the fall, the whole world was flat, the back-curtain of the Lord, and that it was the devil who invented a third dimension. Thus are the words ‘straight’, ‘square’, and ‘flat’ the words of noblemen, but the apple was an orb, and the sin of our first parents, the attempt at getting around God. I myself much prefer the art of painting to sculpture

— Karen Blixen

Hard and cruel though it may seem," said the Cardinal, "yet we, who hold our high office as keepers and watchmen to the story, may tell you, verily, that to its human characters there is salvation in nothing else in the universe. If you tell them -- you compassionate and accommodating human readers -- that they may bring their distress and anguish before any other authority, you will be cruelly deceiving and mocking them. For within our whole universe the story only has authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: 'Who am I?

— Karen Blixen

He conveyed a strange impression of being in safety, and completely secure. He had a courteous little manner with him, and smiled and nodded, as I pointed out the hills and the tall trees to him, as if he were interested in everything, and incapable of surprise at anything. I wondered if this consistency was produced by an entire ignorance of the evil of the world, or by a deep knowledge and acceptance of it.

— Karen Blixen

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 Gong Hills look out for me?

— Karen Blixen

I have read true piety defined as: loving one’s destiny unconditionally – and there is something in it. That is to say: I think that in a way this sort of “religiousness” is the condition for real happiness.

— Karen Blixen

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

— Karen Blixen

It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.

— Karen Blixen