“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, quote from 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.”
― Isak Dinesen, quote from Seven Gothic Tales
“For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.”
― Isak Dinesen, quote from Seven Gothic Tales
“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea”
― Isak Dinesen, quote from 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.”
― Isak Dinesen, quote from 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.”
― Isak Dinesen, quote from Seven Gothic Tales
“Perhaps to them the first condition for anything having real charm was this: that it must not really exist.”
― Isak Dinesen, quote from Seven Gothic Tales
“Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.”
― Isak Dinesen, quote from Seven Gothic Tales
Isak Dinesen
Born place: in Rungsted, Denmark
Born date April 17, 1885
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“Becky told Melissa over baba ghanoush, “Yesterday at church, a lady took me aside with the express purpose to tell me, ‘Don’t feel bad. When God closes a door, he opens a window.’ ”
Melissa choked on some pita bread.
“I kid you not. What the heck does that mean anyway? That I’m supposed to climb out a window now? Or is the window just to air out the house, which is stinking to high heaven, given the fact that the door has been shut indefinitely and NO ONE CAN GET OUT?!”
“Okay,” Melissa said, fishing scrap paper and a pen from her purse, “I want name and address. Tonight I’m going to board up her doors.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from The Actor and the Housewife
“Don’t keep saying ‘huh’, Silas. It makes you sound so crotchety.” “Well, maybe I am crotchety. And I’ll keep saying ‘huh’ if I want to, Sarah. Huh.”
― Angie Sage, quote from Flyte
“Don’t you realize how I adore you?” he whispered against her mouth. “But I couldn’t steal the life of a girl when I wanted a woman’s love. I wanted you to have a choice, not an infatuation.”
― Elizabeth Hunter, quote from This Same Earth
“It is rather curious that the only time suicide is considered sinful by other religions is when it comes as an indulgence.”
― Anton Szandor LaVey, quote from The Satanic Bible
“Where do they come from?" In those days, her every word was gospel truth, and I would have asked anything to keep her talking to me.
"Tears. The first time Oberon left Maeve for her pretty sister, she didn't understand, and she nearly died of sorrow.”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Late Eclipses
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