Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

Question 42: Isak Dinesen?: "All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story or tell a story about them."

Q. I'm looking for the origin of the Blixen quotation that goes something like this: "All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story or tell a story about them."

A. Lynn R. Wilkinson answers this question in an essay, "Hannah Arendt on Karen Blixen."  


The quote seems to have first appeared in a telephone interview published in The New York Times Book Review on November 3, 1957. Wilkinson points out that Karen Blixen actually said something a little different: "One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue."

The quote more famously appeared in 1958 in the book The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt (University of Chicago Press, p. 175). This quote is presented as the inspirational heading to a chapter titled "Action." No source is given.

The quote has since become part of urban legend, appearing frequently in inspirational writing, but I have never found this quote in Isak Dinesen's writing.

Isak Dinesen is mentioned three times in Arendt's book (and it is clear that Isak Dinesen's philosophy influenced Arendt's subject matter). On page 211 Arendt presents the following quote, attributed to Isak Dinesen: "Let physicians and confectioners and the servants of the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are." In a footnote on the same page, Arendt states: "I use here Isak Dinesen's wonderful story 'The Dreamers,' in 'Seven Gothic Tales' (Modern Liberary ed.), especially pp. 340 ff."

This quote does indeed appear in "The Dreamers" on page 340.

Ten years later Arendt quotes her own book, in a review of a biography of Isak Dinesen. She repeats the Isak Dinesen quote you ask about--again without documentation. She also quotes fragments from other random sources (Faulkner and the Hebrew Kaddish among them) without specifying where they came from. [See Isak Dinesen. Daguerreotypes and Other Essays. Foreword by Hannah Arendt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979, p. xix.]

How to explain Arendt's problematic documentation--or lack thereof? I would suggest that she was an insatiable reader who took poor notes and paraphrased well. The quote you ask about seems to reflect Isak Dinesen's philosophy, even if it was not written by her.

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