Karen Blixen (1885–1962,) pseudonym Isak Dinesen, born Karen Dinesen, fully Karen Dinesen Blixen-Finecke, was a Danish novelist and short-story writer. She is best known for Seven Gothic Tales (1934,) and for her autobiography Out of Africa (1937,) which she wrote after living in Kenya 1914–31.
Born in Rungsted, Blixen was educated at home and in France, Switzerland, and England. She embraced English as her principal literary language, translating some of her most significant works back into Danish. In 1914, she married her cousin Baron Bror Blixen Finecke, from whom she contracted syphilis. Their life on an unproductive coffee plantation in Kenya is recounted in Den Afrikanske Farm (1937; Out of Africa, 1938,) which was also the basis of a 1985 Hollywood film starring Meryl Streep.
After her divorce and the death of her lover, the aristocrat Denys Finch-Hatton in a plane crash, Blixen returned to Denmark and began writing the brooding, existential short stories for which she is best known. Like the singer in “The Wide-Travelling Lioness” (in Seven Gothic Tales, 1934; Danish trans. 1935,) they are usually concerned with identity and personal destiny and are markedly aristocratic in spirit. This is confirmed in Winter’s Tales (1942,) Last Tales (1957,) and Anecdotes of Destiny (1958.) ‘Babette’s Feast’ (1950; film 1987,) shows a lighter side to her artistic nature.
Dinesen’s critical writings are collected in Essays (1965) and Daguerreotypes and Other Essays (1979.)
Dinesen was the first Danish author to achieve world renown since Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard. Her impact on Danish literature was especially strong in the 1950s when, through her stories and personal contact, she was an inspiration to younger authors exploring new means of expression.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
To be a person is to have a story to tell.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Storytelling
What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused? Experience, old people’s experience.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Men and women are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Humanity
Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever…
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
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 (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Women
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 (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: One Step at a Time, Conscience
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Writing
The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Crying, Medicine, Happiness, Water
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 (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Wine
All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
I don’t believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Evil
I think these difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way and that so many things that one goes around worry about are of no importance whatsoever.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Living, Worry
God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: The Future, Live-now, Tomorrow
Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Self-Knowledge, Humility, Awareness
I don’t think that … one gets a flash of happiness once, and never again; it is there within you, and it will come as certainly as death.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Difficulty, Happiness
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 form or another, sweat, tears or the salt sea.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Medicine
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