Faraway a leopard barked that high, dissatisfied deep roar it cuts off so sharply, as if its annoyance is too great to express, can only be appeased.

One by one and then together the birds chanted, warbled, whistled, and cooed, like a rare desert plant bursting into life after the rain.

The breeze across the desert as the light died was so sweet she could almost drink it.

Long before the stars died the birds began to sing - cool rippling doves, loud cheery starlings, the long lilting trills of warblers and thrushes.

Dawn raced like fire across the savanna.

Water was how the desert would bring everyone together. The antelope's daily prayer, weighing the mortal need of water with the mortal danger of obtaining it.

I have spent hours and hours watching elephants, and to come to understand what emotional creatures they are...it's not just a species facing extinction, it's massive individual suffering.

Already this sun was pouring its wrath into the blue Indian ocean where swordfish and marlin cruised like silver-blue attenuated warheads in their green-gold depths...

Inside her head or out in the desert was the same, and the air inside her throat was very dry to keep from crying and her neck sore from forcing herself not to look down, not to look back.

The price of ignorance is way more than the price we would have paid to acquire knowledge.

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.

Honesty doesn't mean you reveal everything you discern and feel. That is why we have the word discretion...

To her [Florence Nightingale] chiefly I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine its foundation and its crown.

God is at home, it's we who have gone out for a walk.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

Like dogs who sniff each other when meeting, chess players have a ritual at first acquaintance: they sit down to play speed chess.

Politicians are notoriously economically illiterate. And even when they know what would be the right thing, we don't really expect them to do it.

As they do every year, al-Qaida has threatened to disrupt and ruin Christmas. You know, we already have a group that disrupts and ruins Christmas every year. They're called relatives.

I don't have prejudices. I'm against taboos. But of course there are some things I'll never touch - because as a mom, there are things one doesn't want their children to be around.