Geburtstag: 17. April 1885
Todesdatum: 7. September 1962
Karen Blixen, eigentlich Karen Christence von Blixen-Finecke, geborene Dinesen, war eine dänische Schriftstellerin und 17 Jahre lang eine Kaffeefarmerin in Kenia. Ihr Pseudonym auf dem deutschen Buchmarkt ist meist Tania Blixen. Ihre englischsprachigen Bücher erschienen meist unter dem Pseudonym Isak Dinesen. Karen Blixen wurde in dem Film Jenseits von Afrika von Meryl Streep dargestellt.
— Tania Blixen
"Mottos meines Lebens", Verlag: Rowohlt, ISBN 3-499-13190-0
— Tania Blixen
Reader's Digest, April 1964
— Karen Blixen
As quoted in Reader's Digest (April 1964)
Variant: I know a cure for everything. Salt water … in one form or another, sweat, tears or the salt sea.
— Karen Blixen
As quoted in obituaries (7 September 1962)
— Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
Context: I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.
First lines.
— Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
Context: People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of...
— Karen Blixen, Out of Africa / Shadows on the Grass
— Karen Blixen
Context: Of what happened later in the evening nothing definite can here be stated. None of the guests later on had any clear remembrance of it. They only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had blended into one glorious radiance. Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity. Long after midnight the windows of the house shone like gold, and golden song flowed out into the winter air.
"Babette's Feast"
— Karen Blixen
Context: The consolations of the vulgar are bitter in the royal ear. Let physicians and confectioners and servants in the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are. I have been told that lions, trapped and shut up in cages, grieve from shame more than from hunger.
"The Dreamers"
— Karen Blixen
Context: When later in life they thought of this evening it never occurred to any of them that they might have been exalted by their own merit. They realized that the infinite grace of which General Loewenhielm had spoken had been allotted to them, and they did not even wonder at the fact, for it had been but the fulfillment of an ever-present hope. The vain illusions of this earth had dissolved before their eyes like smoke, and they had seen the universe as it really is. They had been given one hour of the millennium.
"Babette's Feast"
— Karen Blixen
Context: Why, you are to become a story teller, and I shall give you the reasons! Hear then: Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a small snotty lass understands it or not.
"The Blank Page"
— Karen Blixen
Context: The true aristocracy and the true proletariat of the world are both in understanding with tragedy. To them it is the fundamental principle of God, and the key, the minor key, to existence. They differ in this way from the bourgeoisie of all classes, who deny tragedy, who will not tolerate it, and to whom the word tragedy means in itself unpleasantness.
