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. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt.

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

(This town) doesn't look like anything; it isn't anything. Its five tin-roofed huts cling to the skinny tracks of the Uganda Railway like parasites on a vine.

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.

The world grows bigger as the light leaves it. There are no boundaries and no landmarks. The trees and the rocks and the anthills begin to disappear, one by one, whisked away under the magical cloak of evening.

That's what makes death so hard -- unsatisfied curiosity.

All the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.

(Quoting her friend Tom Black on an amateur hunter's injury:)

Lion, rifles -- and stupidity.

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

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

A map says to you. Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not... I am the earth in the palm of your hand.

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.

It seems characteristic of the mind of man that the repression of what is natural to humans must be abhorred, but that what is natural to an infinitely more natural animal must be confined within the bounds of a reason peculiar only to men -- more peculiar sometimes than seems reasonable at all.

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

The sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.

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.

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. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick fall across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.

It seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of towns, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hole, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit.

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

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.