You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
Isak DinesenRead
It is more than their land that you take away from the people, whose native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take their eyes.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the deep emotional and cultural impact of taking away someone's homeland.
In this quote, Isak Dinesen emphasizes that the act of taking away someone's land is not just a physical loss but also a profound removal of their history, identity, and sense of self. The phrase suggests that a people's connection to their homeland is an integral part of who they are, and uprooting them disrupts their very essence, affecting their perception of the world.
Themes
LandIdentityHistoryRootsUprooting
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about cultural preservation, this quote can powerfully highlight the importance of respecting indigenous lands.
More from Isak Dinesen
All quotes →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.
Isak DinesenRead
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.
Isak DinesenRead
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.
Isak DinesenRead
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.
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.
Isak DinesenRead
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