“Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.”

A man can be riddled with malaria for years on end, with its chills and its fevers and its nightmares, but if one day he sees that the water from his kidneys is black, he knows he will not leave that place again, wherever he is, or wherever he hoped to be.

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

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city.

It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy.

I know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains – the drab and dowdy digger in the earth.

Success feeds confidence.

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker’s rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend.

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

In Africa people learn to serve each other. They live on credit balances of little favors that they give and may, one day, ask to have returned.

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.

A word grows to a thought – a thought to an idea – an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveler loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.

I have a trunk containing continents.

At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.

Success breeds confidence.

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

A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.