West With The Night Quotes
"HOW IS IT POSSIBLE to bring order out of memory?"
"Weavers create. This is remembrance — re-visitation; and names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart."
"I remember these things and the men who greeted me at Nungwe."
"Freedom escapes you again, and wings that were a moment ago no less than an eagle’s, and swifter, are metal and wood once more, inert and heavy."
"Africa is of an ancient age and the blood of many of her peoples is as venerable and as chaste as truth."
"Africa lies, and will lie, like a great, wisely somnolent giant unmolested by the noisy drum-rolling of bickering empires."
"It yields nothing, offering much to men of all races."
"But the soul of Africa, its integrity, the slow inexorable pulse of its life, is its own and of such singular rhythm that no outsider, unless steeped from childhood in its endless, even beat, can ever hope to experience it."
"I have lifted my plane from the Nairobi airport 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 firstborn adventure."
"Night flying over charted country by the aid of instruments and radio guidance can still be a lonely business."
"The earth is no more your planet than is a distant star — if a star is shining; the plane is your planet and you are its sole inhabitant."
"All this, together with the fact that there was no radio, nor any system designed to check planes in and out of their points of contact, made it essential for a pilot either to develop his intuitive sense to the highest degree or to adopt a fatalistic philosophy toward life."
"To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe."
"You know then what you had always been told — that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks."
"Lions are more intelligent than some men," he said, "and more courageous than most. A lion will fight for what he has and for what he needs; he is contemptuous of cowards and wary of his equals. But he is not afraid. You can always trust a lion to be exactly what he is — and never anything else."
"The sound of Paddy’s roar in my ears will only be duplicated, I think, when the doors of hell slip their wobbly hinges, one day, and give voice and authenticity to the whole panorama of Dante’s poetic nightmares."
"He believed in duty and in the kind of justice that he knew, and in all the things that were of the earth — like the voice of the forest, the right of a lion to kill a buck, the right of a buck to eat grass, and the right of a man to fight."
"The world had changed without any reason that I could see."
"The world grows bigger as the light leaves it."
"The missionaries have already pitched their tents in the Kavirondo country, which is Otieno’s home."
"He is indefatigable, sleepless, dependable as daylight — and half a mystic."
"Everything else goes on as it always has. Nothing is more common than birth; a million creatures are born in the time it takes to turn this page, and another million die."
"The symbolism is commonplace; countless dreamers have played countless tunes upon the mystery, but horse-breeders are realists and every farmer is a midwife."
"There is no time for mystery. There is only time for patience and care, and hope that what is born is worthy and good."
"I do not know why most foals are born at night, but most of them are."
"Nineteen long days pass, and on the evening of the twentieth, I make the rounds of the stables, as usual, ending at Coquette’s foaling-box."
"Speed sense, sense of height, and sense of error will come later. If they don’t, well … but they will."
"If you had one grain of sense, you wouldn’t make a regular habit of flying for elephant in elephant country."
"Life itself could be better, and I had made it so."
"Elephant, beyond the fact that their size and conformation are aesthetically more suited to the treading of this earth than our angular informity, have an average intelligence comparable to our own."
"The only difference is that the steer has neither the ability nor the chance to outwit the gentleman who wields the slaughterhouse snickersnee, while the elephant has both of these to pit against the hunter."
"I suppose there is nothing more tragic about the death of an elephant than there is about the death of a Hereford steer — certainly not in the eyes of the steer."
"I fly much too low, of necessity, to pick a landing spot in such a case."
"A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think."
"Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday."
"Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will, and my father knows 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.’"
"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."
"All nations lay claim to Africa, but none has wholly possessed her yet. In time she will be taken, yielding neither to Nazi nor to Fascist conquest, but to integrity equal to her own and to wisdom capable of understanding her wisdom."
"Flight is but momentary escape from the eternal custody of earth."
"You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself."
"It is too much that with all those pedestrian centuries behind us we should, in a few decades, have learned to fly; it is too heady a thought, too proud a boast."
"No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things — the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold — were false to you."
"The fear is gone now — not overcome nor reasoned away. It is gone because something else has taken its place; the confidence and the trust, the inherent belief in the security of land underfoot — now this faith is transferred to my plane, because the land has vanished and there is no other tangible thing to fix faith upon."
"Success breeds confidence. But who has a right to confidence except the Gods?"
"The sea will take small pride in that. The Gull had not failed me. When she was checked, after my flight, it was learned that somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland ice had lodged in the air intake of the last petrol tank, partially choking fuel flow to the carburetor."