You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
Isak DinesenRead
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.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the beauty of nature and the feelings of loss and privilege in life.
Isak Dinesen's quote captures the essence of nature as a continuous, vibrant force, using imagery of cicadas and falling stars to evoke the sensory richness of the world. It contrasts these natural wonders with the experience of loss, suggesting that even in moments of grief or deprivation, one can still find beauty and privilege in existence.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about appreciating the beauty of life even in tough times.
You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch... and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order... by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery.
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 dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.
The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.
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.
through the loveliness and power of her dream world she was now, in her old frock and botched shoes, very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth
Awakened at midnight by the sound of the water jar cracking from the ice
When I first ventured into the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea appeared to be a blue infinity too large, too wild to be harmed by anything that people could do.
Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with force and convulsive energy, full of expression, passion, and strength.
In the valley of the giants where the stars and stripes explode, the peaches they were sweet and the milk and honey flowed.
The preciousness of life and the changes of weather and the beauty of seasons - all those things have always sort of dazzled me.
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