Elspeth Huxley Quotes

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.

You cannot sell a blemished apple in the supermarket, but you can sell a tasteless one provided it is shiny, smooth, even, uniform and bright.

Africa is cruel...it takes your heart and grinds it into powdered stone - and no-one minds

Only man is not content to leave things as they are but must always be changing them, and when he has done so, is seldom satisfied with the result.

The pioneer kills what he loves.

English tradition debars from dinner-table conversation almost all topics that might interest the conversers and insists upon strict adherence to banalities.

How much does one imagine, how much observe? One can no more separate those functions than divide light from air, or wetness from water.

[... vastly different peoples live and work side by side but rarely come together, like the arms of an egg beater that] whirled independently and never touched, so that perhaps one arm never knew the other was there; yet they were together, turned by the same handle, and the cake was mixed by both.

They [zebras] looked like highly varnished animated toys.

To deceive gracefully is the very essence of social life. One must start by deceiving oneself, and make a lifelong practice of deceiving others; if one does it well enough, in time one might even become an artist, the greatest illusionists of all.

The great point about money was to convert it as quickly as possible into something you could use or enjoy.

The Beatties were always arguing, it gave them an interest in life.

One of the stock Sydney jokes is of the census-taker who enquires: 'How many children have you, ma'am?' 'Two living and three in Melbourne.'

Dogs may be divided into two classes: those who are merely afraid of cattle and those who can't abide them.