I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain at Ngong.
A giraffe is so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plains in long garb, draperies of morning mist her mirage.
Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons nor divided the substance.
There is something about Safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows.
It is little silly to be a caricature of something of which you know very little, and which means very little to you, but to be your own caricature – that is the true carnival!
The divine art is the story.
When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.
A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the panis angelorum.
The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.
Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest.
You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my “life has been wasted” here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know.
One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.
I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open to them.
A great artist is never poor.
You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.
We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.
Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.
I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.