“In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.”

To me, desert has the quality of darkness; none of the shapes you see in it are real or permanent. Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless, and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility.

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.

Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?

That’s what makes death so hard–unsatisfied curiosity

This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets – and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other.

For all professional pilots there exists a kind of guild, without charter and without by-laws. it demands no requirements for inclusion save an understanding of the wind, the compass, the rudder, and fair fellowship.

She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation, but yields her own desires gently.

We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup.

Conformation … but not much else. Breeding, but too small a heart. You saw it everywhere – in men, in horses, and in women.

There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa.

There’s an old adage,” he said, “translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages — “Life is life and fun is fun, but it’s all so quiet when the goldfish die.

Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead.

A lovely horse is always an experience…. It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words.

One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day that will be an airborne life.

We fly, but we have not ‘conquered’ the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand.

Nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin’s lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it.

Between the ages of 12 and 17, for example, a parent ages as much as 20 years.

Much like a wobbly toddler or an unhinged politician, one immediately looks for someone else to blame. God. Your parents. Ex-girlfriends. Undocumented immigrants. Marvin in Human Resources. China.

My parents are deeply pious Hindus.

If everything kept to its normal progression, we would live with the sadness-cry and then walk-but what really breaks us cleanest are the losses that happen out of order.

When people hear about teenage parents and teenage pregnancy, they attribute a lot of personality traits to those individuals, which is just such a bizarre thing when you really think about it.

[Harriet Tubman] spoke passionately about her parents, her friends, shared stories about her childhood.

My parents were vegetarians. I’d show up at school, this giant black kid, with none of the cool clothes and a tofu sandwich and celery sticks.

Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn’t appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.