Laura’s Reviews > Dreaming of Lions: My Life in the Wild Places > Status Update

"An autobiography should be truthful, or as truthful as possible, although a friend once said, "Why ruin a good story with truth?""

"I would rather have lost an arm than be a debutante, and loftily told her that while that girl was prancing around at her party, I was driving an army six-by-six through the Okavango Swamp. To me, a debutante was a moron in a prom dress. To my future mother-in-law, a swamp was unclean mud, especially if it was in Africa, and I was nothing but a tomboy in an army truck. We turned up our noses at each other."

"[...] I provided some kids with paper and crayons, neither of which they had ever seen before. Nor did the Bushmen we knew make any kind of visual representations. The girls refused to draw, but the boys were willing, and not surprisingly, they drew tracks. Of course they did. They were asked to produce a visual image, and the only visual representation of something that wasn't actually present would be its tracks."

"Bushmen men didn't consider themselves brave or macho even when they drove off prowling lions, which they did without weapons, just by talking to them respectfully and showing them burning branches. And when white strangers appeared in roaring trucks, which these people had never seen or heard before, their men came out to deal with us too [...]. It was very much the Old Way."

"I was sad to leave Kavasitjue, and give her two gifts, which, as I recall, were a scarf and a blanket. The started to thank me, then folded the gifts in her arms and said, "Too much thanks is like a curse. I sit here with my delights."

"This was the Kalahari Basin. Around the edges, the maps indicated a few features, mostly small settlements and prehistoric riverbeds, but in the interior were 120,000 square miles where the maps showed nothing. On the map my Dad used, there was a line for 20° east longitude and another line for 20° south latitude, and that's all."

"So, as I saw it, there where two spheres of existence - the one I lived in, which was the sphere of people, and the one I barely knew, which was the sphere of everything else, from amoebas to blue whales, from duckweed to giant sequoias, from the floor of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Everest."

"[...T]he tiny, snail-like thing we were looking at was [...] a cluster of a trillion stars, collectively known as the Andromeda Galaxy [...] Its light had traveled for 2.5 million years before it reached us. When the light we saw that night left its galaxy, our Homo habilis ancestors were figuring out how to make stone tools. By the time that same light reached us, we were modern Homo sapiens with telescopes. Wow!"

"I like to look at the stars, so far away, so steady on their paths through the sky. They've been credited to Gaia, the goddess whose name means Earth and who is best known for managing our planet, orbiting a little star among 4 billion others in our galaxy. [H]owever small, our planet is complex and took 4.5 billion years to reach the state in which we know it, thanks to measures which were also credited to Gaia."