Karen Blixen citáty

strana 3

„Minulost nezměníš, ale můžeš si zničit přítomnost starostmi o budoucnost.“

„Byť oheň pohltil prach mého těla, nermoutí mě to. Tam, kde jsem, je dobře být…“

„Když se domorodcům bere země jejich předků, bere se jim víc než samotná země. Zároveň ztrácejí svou minulost, kořeny a zvyky, své prvé já, svůj život.“

„Měl jsem farmu v Africe, na úpatí Ngong Hills.“

„Vím o léku na všechno: slaná voda ... ať tak, či onak. Pot, slzy nebo slané moře.“

“Nobody has seen the trekking birds take their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or rivers break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.”

“A fashion always has some meaning. The fashion, or style, of renunciation really meant something then. It was inspired by the war, or it ran parallel to the war, and could not have been conceived without the war… It stood for the will to sacrifice — if the unlimited will to throw away can be called the will to sacrifice. It was arrogant and elegantly cynical — because it is arrogant and elegantly cynical when the symbol of the élite becomes hunger. The superfluous here threw away the necessary quite simply. In its inner essence it was the disdain of death.”

“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.”

“Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker's mind.”

“Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 — to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90.”

“God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.”