novelists-from-denmark

"I had woken to the same eighteenth of November two days in a row and everything that was going on around me was happening exactly as it had the day before, it was a replica of the day I already had stored in my memory."

"But the next morning, when Thomas woke once more to his first eighteenth of November, he had forgotten everything and once more I had to tell him what had happened and how far we had got with our investigations."

"Often, we would simply come to the conclusion that you cannot know everything, that you have to accept some displacement in life, that you have to expect inconsistencies, and that was what we encountered: patterns and inconsistencies, two worlds trying to merge."

"It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate."

"At the post office in the rue Pareillet I felt compelled to check the date on the screen of the stamp-vending machine, as if seeking a loophole in the host of signs that the day was repeating itself. But wherever I looked the date was the same. There was no doubt. It was the eighteenth of November for the third time."

"We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable."

"There were inconsistencies in time and it was impossible to discern a pattern that made sense."

"Jeg kunde slet ikke sove For Nattergalens Røst, Som fra de dunkle Skove Sig trængte til mit Bryst. Jeg aabnede Vinduet stille Og stirred i Mulmet hen, Og lod hver Elskovstrille Mig synge om igjen."

"There is no God, and man is His prophet," said Niels bitterly, but with a touch of sadness. "Yes, exactly!" jeered Hjerrild; a moment afterwards he said, "Yet atheism is exceedingly modest in its claims, for its object is really nothing or less than to disillusion mankind. The belief in a God who guides and judges is man's last great illusion, and when this is gone—what then? He will be wiser; but richer, happier? I do not see it."

"However high a mortal may set his throne, however firmly he may place upon his brow the tiara of exception that signifies genius, he can never be perfectly sure that he may not some day, like , be seized with the strange desire to go on all-fours and eat grass with the meanest beasts of the field."

"... Man's love is a course of drill. And we submit to it; even those whom no one loves submit—contemptible weaklings that we are!" She rose from her recumbent position and looked threateningly across at Niels. "If I were beautiful—oh, I mean bewitchingly beautiful, lovelier than any woman that ever lived, so that all who saw me were smitten, as if by magic, with the anguish of unquenchable love—how I should compel them by the power of my beauty to adore, not their traditional, bloodless ideal, but me, myself, as I lived and moved, every single inch of me, every corner of my being and every spark of my nature!"

"And perhaps, I think to myself now, there are no real stories at all with beginnings, middles and ends, perhaps there simply is what there is, and what happens, and the lines we draw between those points are just nonsense and dreams, and the figure that arises from those lines could just as well have been something else completely."

"Perhaps I am finally the person I have really always been."

"Lots of resistance. People really didn’t like it. ‘What is she doing here? This is not her job, she should stay being an actress.’ But I just wanted to see if I could do it, that’s all. And I wrote novels. And did singing – two albums, or did I say that already?"

"I like the earlier [Jean-Luc Godard films] better. The earlier ones are human, the later ones abstract. Like Cubist paintings – not so fun. One day in Los Angeles, I went to a museum and paid $25 and what did I see? White cubes! What’s going on? I go back to the ticket booth and said: ‘I want my money back. I don’t want to look at white cubes.’"

"She left me because of my many faults; I left her because I couldn’t talk movies with her."

"Si j'écris mon histoire, c'est telle que je l'ai vécue. Je dis toujours la vérité. Je ne vais ni enjoliver ni noircir le tableau."

"Serge savait ce qu'il voulait, perfectionniste, on a beaucoup répété, on se parlait même en verlan. Je me suis rarement autant amusée avec un homme, nous étions très complices."

"We did not see ourselves as remaking cinema at the time, at least not in my view. Myself and the other actors were not part of the industry; we weren’t inside the star system. We were running around, shooting in the streets, hiding behind trees to do our makeup. It was a very simple way of working."

"I came to the showroom to show pictures, and [Coco Chanel] said, “Okay, we’ll make a test to see if you can do it.” I was a little girl—about 17-and-a-half—and so I went into the makeup room and I did my makeup, and my hair, and the eyes to get them a little bit bolder. This woman came in with a big hat, she was 66 or 65 or something like that, but very beautiful! Kind of militaire. She said, “What is your name little girl?” I was talking to the makeup lady, and said, “My name is Hanne Karin Bayer.” She said, “Hanne Karin Bayer? And you want to be an actress? You’ve got to call yourself Anna Karina.” And I said, “Oh that sounds good, thank you, Madame.” Afterwards everybody told me it was Coco Chanel. Two weeks later I got my photo on the cover of Elle magazine and I really got work. That was a big honor at the time, and they called me “Anna Karina,” but they spelled it the wrong way in the beginning, with a “C,” the Italian way."

"As soon as we were happy, he tried to get at us by another means, another path. He provoked a new ordeal. One could have thought that it bored him, happiness."

"J'imaginais que j'allais voyager avec des gitans et que j'allais chanter dans la rue. Un peu comme Piaf. Je connaissais toutes les chansons des chanteuses réalistes, Damia, Berthe Sylva, Fréhel. Je me rappelle aussi que je voulais me marier avec Louis Armstrong"

"Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that."

"'Are you sure,' she asked, 'that it is God whom you serve?' The Cardinal looked up, met her eyes and smiled very gently. 'That,' he said, 'that, Madame, is a risk which the artists and the priests of this world have to run!'"

"(Tell us about your favorite short story.) ...Isak Dinesen’s masterworks, “The Deluge at Norderney” and “The Monkey,” are so important to me that I keep wearing out the collection they are part of — “Seven Gothic Tales.”"

"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."

"When soon I sail from here, I may again run into such a storm as the one in Kvasefjord. But this time I shall clearly understand that it is not a play in the theatre, but it is death. and it seems too that then, in the last moment before we go down, I can in in all truth be yours..."

"It never has happened, and it never will happen, and that is why it is told."

"The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept."

"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."

"I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser..."

"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."

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

"In a foreign country and with foreign species of life one should take measures to find out whether things will be keeping their value when dead. To settlers I give this advice: "For the sake of your eyes and hearts, shoot not the Iguana.""

"Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other."

"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."

"As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen."

"There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne — bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive."

"Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons nor divided the substance."

"I had time after time watched the progression across the plain of the giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long stemmed spackled gigantic flowers slowly advancing. It was, in giant size, the border of a very old, infinitely precious Persian carpet in the dyes of green, yellow and black-brown"

"Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine. A young man in love is essentially enraptured by the forces within himself."

"My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady..."

"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."

"It was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet like the strong and refined essence of a continent... The views were immensely wide — everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility."

"In the Ngong Forest I have also seen, on a narrow path through thick growth, in the middle of a very hot day, the Giant Forest Hog, a rare person to meet."

"White people, who for a long time live alone with Natives, get into the habit of saying what they mean, because they have no reason or opportunity for dissimulation, and when they meet again their conversation keeps the Native tone."

"I have sometimes come upon the Iguana, the big lizard, as they were sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a river-bed. They are not pretty in shape, but nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their colouring. They shine like a heap of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window. When, as you approach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green and purple over the stones, the color seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet's luminous tail. Once I shot an Iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten. As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal, which had radiated out all that glow and splendor. Now that the flame was put out, and the soul had flown, the Iguana was as dead as a sandbag."

"Often since I have, in some sort, shot an Iguana, and have remembered that one in the reserve. Up at Meru I saw a young Native girl with a bracelet on, a leather strap two inches wide, and all embroidered over with very small turquoise-coloured beads which varied little in colour and played in green, light blue and ultra-marine. It was an extraordinarily live thing; it seemed to draw breath on her arm, so that I wanted it for myself, and made Farah buy it from her. No sooner had it come upon my arm that it gave up the ghost. It was nothing now, a small, cheap, purchased article of finery. It had been the play of colors, the duet between the turquoise and the "negre", — that quick, sweet, brownish black, like peat and black pottery, of the Native's skin, — that had created the life of the bracelet. ...I stood in Meru and looked at my pale hand and the dead bracelet, it was as if an injustice had been done to a noble thing, as if truth had been suppressed. So sad did it seem that I remembered the saying of the hero in a book that I had read as a child: "I have conquered them all, but I am standing amongst graves.""

"Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification."

"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?"