Out of Africa (book)
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Out of Africa (First published 1937) is a memoir by the Danish author Karen Blixen The book, recounts events of the seventeen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then called British East Africa.
Quotes
[edit]- I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
- Narrator, Part 1, Chapter 1.
- Up in this air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.
- Narrator, Part 1, Chapter 1.
- I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation, I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dust on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I began in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.
- Narrator, Part 1, Chapter 3.
- ls when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.
- Narrator, Part 2, Chapter 1.
- The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.
- Narrator, Part 2, Chapter 1.
- I turned to the animal world from the world of men; my heart was heavy with the tragedy of the night.
- Narrator, Part 2, Chapter 2.
- A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the panis angelorum.
- Narrator, Part 3, Chapter 1.
- The yeast was out of the bread of the land. A presence of gracefulness, gaiety and freedom, an electric power-factor was out. A cat had got up and left the room.
- Narrator, Part 3, Chapter 7.
- Every time that I have gone up in an airplane and looking down have realized that I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a great new discovery. 'I see:' I have thought, 'This was the idea. And now I understand everything.'
- Narrator, Part 3, Chapter 8.
- Love the pride of the conquered nations, and leave them to honor their father and their mother.
- Narrator, Part 4, Chapter 8.
- It seems to you, as you read the case through, a strange, a humiliating fact that the Europeans should not, in Africa, have power to throw the African out of existence.
- Narrator, Part 4, Chapter 17.
- Between the river in the mellow English landscape and the African mountain ridge, ran the path of this life. ... The bowstring was released on the bridge at Eton, the arrow described its orbit, and hit the obelisk in the Ngong Hills.
- Narrator, Part 5, Chapter 3.
- The outline of the mountain was slowly smoothed and leveled out by the hand of distance.
- Narrator, Part 5, Chapter 5.
- Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be."
- Chapter 1, Narrator.
- The relation between the white and black race in Africa in many ways resembles the relation between the two sexes."
- Part 4.
- On the Western wall of my house there was a stone seat and in front of a table made out of a mill-stone. This stone had a tragic history: it was the upper mill-stone of the mill of the two murdered Indians. After the murder nobody dared to take over the mill, it was empty and silent for a long time, and I had the stone brought up to my house to form a tabletop, to remind me of Denmark.
- Part 2, Chapter 5, paragraph 16.
- I had remained sitting on my horse while I talked to him, to accentuate that he was not a guest in the house, for I did not want him in to dine with me.
- Part 3, chapter 5, paragraph 5.
- These little boys, who wandered about on the farm in the company of their fathers' herds of goats and sheep, looking up grazing for them, did in a way form a link between the life of my civilized house and the life of the wild.
- Part 1,chapter 3, paragraph 21.
- It also seemed to me that the free union between my house and the antelope was a rare, honourable thing.
- Part 1,chapter 4, paragraph 45.
- The old men sitting at my house made me uneasy; in old times people must have had that feeling when they thought it likely that a witch of the neighbourhood had fixed her mind upon them, or was at that very moment carrying a wax-child under her clothes, to be baptized with their own name.
- Part 2, Chapter 2,paragraph 5.
- As far as Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch-Hatton were concerned, my house was a communist establishment. Everything in it was theirs, and they took a pride in it, and brought home the things they felt to be lacking.
- Part 3,chapter 7, paragraph 1.
- Denys Finch-Hatton had no other home in Africa than the farm, he lived in my house between his Safaris, and kept his books and his gramophone there.
- Part 3,chapter 8,paragraph 1.
- I thought out many devices for the salvation of the farm.
- Part 5,Chapter 1, paragraph 4.
- Denys sometimes talked of making Takaunga his home in Africa, and of starting his Safaris from there. When I began to talk of having to leave the farm, he offered me his house down there, as he had had mine in the highlands.
- Part 5,Chapter 2,paragraph 15.
