Roots of the weed sucked first life from the genesis of earth and hold the essence of it still. Always the weed returns; the cultured plant retreats before it.

The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all.

No human pursuit achieves dignity unless 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 irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold - were false to you.

I learned what every dreaming child needs to know, that no horizon is so far you cannot get above it or beyond it.

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are burried deep-leave it anyway except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can.

But the soul of Africa, its integrity, the slow inexorable pulse of its life, is its own and of such singular rhythm that no outsider, unless steeped from childhood in its endless, even beat, can ever hope to experience it, except only as a bystander might experience a Masai war dance knowing nothing of its music nor the meaning of its steps.

the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.