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

You can live a lifetime and at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself.

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

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing

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.

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.