To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told -- that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.

Conformation ... but not much else. Breeding, but too small a heart. You saw it everywhere - in men, in horses, and in women.

In the family of continents, Africa is the silent, the brooding sister, courted for centuries by knight-errant empires - rejecting them one by one and severally, because she is too sage and a little bored with the importunity of it all.

Life had a different shape; it had new branches and some of the old branches were dead.

A lovely horse is always an experience.... It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words.

there are many Africas.

[The lion] began to contemplate me with a kind of quiet premeditation, like that of a slow-witted man fondling an unaccustomed thought.