"Out of Africa"

[fiefoe]

I've had this book on my bookshelf since college. Now the book makes me want to watch the movie again. I wonder how long that would take.

Vintage Africa:

• The views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.
• Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.
• Monsoon, the East Wind, which was King Solomon's favourite horse. Up here it is felt as just the resistance of the air, as the Earth throws herself forward in space.
• Camping-places fix themselves in your mind as if you had spent long periods of your life in them. You will remember a curve of your wagon track in the grass of the plain, like the features of a friend.
• *** I had seen a herd of buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished. I had seen a herd of elephants travelling through the dense native forest, where the sunlight is strewn between the thick creepers in small spots and patches, pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world. It was, in giant size, the border of a very old, infinitely precious Persian carpet, in the dyes of green, yellow and black-brown. I had time after time watched the progression across the plain of the giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness, as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long-stemmed, speckled gigantic flowers slowly advancing. I had followed two rhinos on their morning promenade, when they were sniffing and snorting in the air of the dawn...and looked like two very big angular stones rollicking in the long valley and enjoying life together. I had seen the royal lion, before sunrise, below a waning moon, crossing the gray plain on his way home from the kill, drawing a dark wake in the silvery grass, his face still red up to the ears, or during the midday siesta, when he reposed contentedly in the midst of his family...
• (In the highlands) the light gets clearer, and, about sunrise, the sea-bottom lifts itself towards the surface, a new created island.
• (Lion shooting) I stood, panting, in the grass, aglow with the plenipotence a shot gives you, because you take effect at a distance.