The flamingoes are the most delicately colored of all the African birds, pink and red like a flying twig of an oleander bush. They have incredibly long legs and bizarre and recherchรฉ curves of their necks and bodies, as if from some exquisite traditional prudery they were making all attitudes and movements in life as difficult as possible.
Isak DinesenThere are times of great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist of the drizzling rain.
Isak DinesenI start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.
Isak DinesenHere and there, in some older houses, old faded daguerreotypes still hang on the walls... They seem to us to be very simple... compared with the artistic and skillful portraits made in later days... Here was a photograph that at one time had been the last word, a very modern portrait... Today it is just a part of cultural history. The small yellowed surface has acquired depth, an admonishing perspective. We hold in our hand a symbol of the structure and ideology of an epoch.
Isak Dinesen