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.

I look at my yesterdays for months past, and find them as good a lot of yesterdays as anybody might want. I sit there in the firelight and see them all. The hours that made them were good, and so were the moments that made the hours. I have had responsibilities and work, dangers and pleasure, good friends, and a world without walls to live in.

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.

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

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

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