H. Rider Haggard

It is a hard thing when one has shot sixty-five lions or more, as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco.

The thirst for the wilderness was on me; I could tolerate this place no more; I would go and die as I had lived, among the wild game and the savages.

“Well,” I said aloud, at last, “it is to be hoped that I shall be able to do something with the inside of my head, for I shall certainly never do anything by the help of the outside.”

It was quiet⁠—quiet as death, and lonely as the grave.

By Osiris who sleeps at Abouthis, I write the truth.

“You show us the woodcocks, Jeffries,” answered Quatermain quickly, for he never liked being crossed in anything to do with sport, “and we will look after shooting them.”

Light reflected from a hundred facets dissipates itself in space and is lost; that concentrated in one tremendous ray pierces to the stars.

Man must die; I’d rather like to try a new country myself; the elephants are getting worked out about here.

Human nature is God’s kaleidoscope, and the little bits of coloured glass which represent our passions, hopes, fears, joys, aspirations towards good and evil and whatnot, are turned in His mighty hand as surely and as certainly as it turns the stars, and continually fall into new patterns and combinations.

“No, no,” he said earnestly. “Promise me that you won’t. I am going to die, and, like a poisoned rat, I wish to die alone.”

I stood alone there before it, and wept like a woman.

Knowest thou not that in every suit of mail there is a joint, and woe to him who wears the harness if the sword should search it out!

It was about as dull a business as the last hour of a comic opera.

Nothing surprised him because he lacked the faculty of surprise.

The Garden of Eden, no doubt, looked fair before man was, but I always think that it must have been fairer when Eve adorned it.

Before a bad storm the game always herd together, but they cease their calling.

Life exists; why therefore should not the means of preserving it indefinitely exist also?

It was a beautiful place, but the beauty was the beauty of death

For Woman, in her weakness, is yet the strongest force upon the earth.

It is very disconcerting to see an elephant’s trunk when you expect to see his tail