startling banals

Kamante was "the kind of stuff from which, in the olden days, they made court jesters." He was "aware of this separateness of his, himself, with the arrogant greatness of soul of the real dwarf, who, when he finds himself at a difference with the whole world, holds the world to be crooked." This is a quality found in many of Dinesen's heroes, and one she cultivated in herself. It is the heroism of the dreamer, the eccentric, and the pervert: all those who have been planted in life with their taproots bent and who never thrive, or bear fruit, but who seem to flower "more richly than the others."