There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa -- and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the know...
I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny
Atop their gleaming backs the jockeys look like gaudy baubles, secured with strings. They bob up and down, they rise, lean forward, then settle again.
All this, and discontent too! Otherwise, why am I sitting here dreaming of England? Why am I gazing at this campfire like a lost should seeking a hope when all that I love is at my wingtips? Because I...
A life has to move or it stagnates.
Our hostess backed out of the room, grinning vapidly. She had long since forgotten the meaning of a smile, but the physical ability to make the gesture remained. I felt that the grin...would shatter i...
We fly, but we have not 'conquered' the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, havi...
There is respect for a heart like yours, and if its beating stop, the spirit lives to guard the ways you wandered.
The young man tied his shuka on his shoulder one day and took his shield and his spear and went to war. He thought war was made of spears and shields and courage, and he brought them all. But they gav...
The mechanistic age impended over an horizon not hostile, but silently indifferent.
Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it.
No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things — the experiments, the irrel...
I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny. It seems to get up early and go to bed very late, and it acts most generously toward the people who nudge it off the road whenever they...
All the pieces are put together, and the whole is yours …’ A word grows to a thought — a thought to an idea — an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveller loafing in...
Two brown eyes that seemed trapped in a spider web of weary lines.
Many German flyers, having a superstition that to wish good luck brings bad luck, will see a fellow pilot off with the cheering remark, ‘Farewell — but I hope you break your arms and legs!
Life is life and fun is fun, but it’s all so quiet when the goldfish die.
It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation’s hour had left it.
It is really this that makes death so hard — curiosity unsatisfied.
I knew too little of Africa to leave it, and what I knew I loved too much.