A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.

It is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flier is the flight itself. . . Every time I have gone up in an aeroplane and looked down have realized I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a new discovery. "I see:" I have thought, "This was the idea. And now I understand everything."

There is a particular hapiness in giving a man whom you like very much, good food that you have cooked yourself.

Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous solution. Be brave, be brave.

There was a place in the Hills, on the first ridge in the Game Reserve, that I myself at the time when I thought that I was to live and die in Africa, had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: "Let us drive as far as our graves.

I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain at Ngong.

Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the Word of the Lord is to the soul.