there are many Africas.

Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice

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

The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.

I have lifted my plane . . . for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the Earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of first-born adventure.

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

Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it.