Elspeth Huxley > Quotes

“How much does one imagine, how much observe? One can no more separate those functions than divide light from air, or wetness from water.”
― Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

“this was a moment of magic revealing to us all, for a few moments, a hidden world of grace and wonder beyond the one of which our eyes told us, a world that no words could delineate, as insubstanttial as a cloud, as iridescent as a dragon-fly and as innocent as the heart of a rose.”
― Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

“The best way to find out things, if you come to think of it, is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun; bang it goes, and everything takes flight and runs for shelter. But if you sit quite still and pretend not to be looking, all the little facts will come and peck round your feet, situations will venture forth from thickets and intentions will creep out and sun themselves on a stone; and if you are very patient, you will see and understand a great deal more than a man with a gun.”
― Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

“Tilly was downcast; as with all perfectionists, it was the detail others might not notice that destroyed for her the pleasure of achievement.”
― Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

“...that's the way to tell a true story from a made-up one. A made-up story always has a neat and tidy end. But true stories don't end, at least until their heroes and heroines die, and not then really because the things they did and didn't do, sometimes live on.”
― Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

“...when the present stung her, she sought her antidote in the future, which was as sure to hold achievement as the dying flower to hold the fruit when its petals wither.”
― Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

“What sorts of sin?"

Any sort. When other people commit them, you are startled, but when you commit them yourself, they seem absolutely natural.”
― Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

“Older Explorers went to seek the source of rivers and to map their tributaries. Today one seeks the source of human conduct and tries to map the course of history....There are no problems in AFrica. For Problems have solutions, and the enigmas of human behaviour can never be solved.”
― Elspeth Huxley, Four Guineas

“The pioneer kills what he loves.”
― Elspeth Huxley

“Forests are the mother of streams. They nourish and protect the springs, and if they are destroyed the springs dry up, rivers cease to flow, people and their cattle have to move elsewhere and another bit of Africa is turned into desert. This is going on all the time.”
― Elspeth Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun

“Men did exist down there, even a railway, but its single line, constructed with so much effort and danger, was a tiny thread invisible in so great a cloth of plain and mountain that you felt a single twitch of the bony shoulders underneath would dispose, in an instant, of such trivial little scratches.”
― Elspeth Huxley, The Mottled Lizard

“the fact that the end of a successful hunt was the destruction of a beautiful animal had begun to nibble at the roots of my enjoyment.”
― Elspeth Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun

“For many, hopes that burgeoned with uhuru have gone sour. The bwana has merely changed the colour of his skin, not shared out his possessions. He still drives around in a great big motor car while you trudge or, if you are lucky, pedal on a clapped-out bicycle.”
― Elspeth Huxley, Out in the Midday Sun