Seven Gothic Tales Quotes

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“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.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast....Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting.”
― Karen Blixen, Seven Gothic Tales

“For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.”
― Karen Blixen, Seven Gothic Tales

“Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“Women, when they are old enough to have done with the business of being women, and can let loose their strength, must be the most powerful creatures in the whole world.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the word of the Lord is to the soul.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“She had what the Councillor knew, in the technical language of the ballet, as "ballon", a lightness that is not only the negation of weight, but which actually seems to carry upwards and make for flight, and which is rarely found in thin dancers - as if the matter itself had here become lighter than air, so that the more there is of it the better it works.”
― Karen Blixen, Seven Gothic Tales

“Where, My Lord, is music bred—upon the instrument or within the ear that listens? The loveliness of woman is created in the eye of man.”
― Karen Blixen, Seven Gothic Tales

“Truth is for tailors and shoemakers. ... I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“Perhaps to them the first condition for anything having real charm was this: that it must not really exist.”
― Karen Blixen, Seven Gothic Tales

“[W]here in the world did you get the ideathat the Lord wants the truth from us? It is a strange, a most orig-
inal, idea of yours, My Lord [Cardinal]. Why, he knows it already, and may even have found it a little bit dull. Truth is for tailors and shoemakers, My Lord. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades. Do you not yourself tell us, my lords spiritual, that our trials are really blessings in disguise? And so they are. I, too, have found them to be so, at midnight, at the hour when the mask falls. But at the same time nobody can deny that they have been dressed up by the hand of an unrivaled expert. The Lord himself—with your permission—seems
to me to have been masquerading pretty freely at the time when he took on flesh and dwelt amongst us.”
― The Deluge at Norderney”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“...and do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“… and you, Marcus, have given me many things; now I shall give you this good advice. Be many people. Give up the game of being always Marcus Cocoza. You have worried too much about Marcus Cocoza, so that you have been really his slave and prisoner. You have not done anything without first considering how it would affect Marcus Cocoza’s happiness and prestige. You were always much afraid that Marcus might do a stupid thing, or be bored. What would it really have mattered? All over the world people are doing stupid things… I should like you to be easy, your little heart to be light again. You must from now, be more than one, many people, as many as you can think of…”
― Karen Blixen, Seven Gothic Tales

“You do not know', said the Princess of Augustenberg to Herr Gottingen, 'what a place this is for making you clean. That sea breeze has blown straight through my bonnet and my clothes, and through the very flesh and the bones of me, until my heart and spirit are swept, sun-dried, and salted.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“The truth, my children, is that we are, all of us, act-
ing in a marionette comedy. What is important more than anything else in a marionette comedy, is keeping the ideas of the author clear. This is the real happiness of life, and now that I have at last come into a marionette play, I will never go out of it again.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“He was not dogmatic enough to believe that you must
have boards and footlights to be within the theater; he carried the stage with him in his heart.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“[W]here in the world did you get the ideathat the Lord wants the truth from us? It is a strange, a most orig-
inal, idea of yours, My Lord [Cardinal]. Why, he knows it already, and may even have found it a little bit dull. Truth is for tailors and shoemakers, My Lord. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades. Do you not yourself tell us, my lords spiritual, that our trials are really blessings in disguise? And so they are. I, too, have found them to be so, at midnight, at the hour when the mask falls. But at the same time nobody can deny that they have been dressed up by the hand of an unrivaled expert. The Lord himself—with your permission—seems
to me to have been masquerading pretty freely at the time when he took on flesh and dwelt amongst us.”
--The Deluge at Norderney”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“[W]here in the world did you get the ideathat the Lord wants the truth from us? It is a strange, a most orig-
inal, idea of yours, My Lord [Cardinal]. Why, he knows it already, and may even have found it a little bit dull. Truth is for tailors and shoemakers, My Lord. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades. Do you not yourself tell us, my lords spiritual, that our trials are really blessings in disguise? And so they are. I, too, have found them to be so, at midnight, at the hour when the mask falls. But at the same time nobody can deny that they have been dressed up by the hand of an unrivaled expert. The Lord himself—with your permission—seems
to me to have been masquerading pretty freely at the time when he took on flesh and dwelt amongst us.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“You know, Tembu," said Mira suddenly, after a pause, "that if, in planting a coffee tree, you bend the taproot, that tree will start, after a little time, to put out a multitude of small delicate roots near the surface. That tree will never thrive, nor bear fruit, but it will flower more richly than the others.

Those fine roots are the dreams of the tree. As it puts them out, it need no longer think of its bent taproot. It keeps alive by them— a little, not very long. Or you can say that it dies by them, if you like. For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“I want to study astronomy,” said the boy, “because I can no longer stand the thought of time. It feels like a prison to me, and if I could only get away from it altogether I think I should be happy.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“So your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet and live with, into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and pretends to be, in some way, the truth about you.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“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.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales