Elephant Dawn Quotes

“It is here too that I learn about a survey carried out among a group of 95 year olds. If they could do it all again, these wise elders were asked, what would they do differently? They would take more risks. They would take more time for reflection. And they would leave a legacy.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“There is a downside to knowing elephants so intimately. They've already touched a place in my heart so deep that I sometimes feel almost paralysed by this passion.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“In the elephants' rumbles and in the feel of living ivory, I've found a life that has real meaning to me - and there can be no escape. Not now anyway.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“She has no hand for me to hold, but I want to hold her trunk; to tell her that everything will be okay; to beg her to stay safe.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“It's satisfying when visitors leave with a deep respect for elephants and a new-found desire to stand up for their welfare.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“We talk evocatively about our own lives and how different it all might have been. But there can be no regrets. Because no matter how we got here, we are three very different women who somehow became special friends, still sharing extraordinary times that we'll cherish forever.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“One way or another, every person who covets ivory carvings and trinkets has the blood of an elephant on their hands.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“There are still so many things that we don’t understand about these remarkably intelligent and sensitive creatures.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“The most dangerous predator in Africa, I’ve come to realise, is not the lion. Nor can the hippo, the buffalo or the elephant hope to compete. The most dangerous animal by far is man. Hwange”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“Through a symphony of rumbles elephants greet, call, comfort, coordinate and converse. There are long soft rumbles, loud throaty rumbles, slow deep rumbles, low purring rumbles, short gurgling rumbles - and these are just the ones that are audible to my ears.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“The government loves to exaggerate things like birth rates, population growth and some vegetation impacts. Figures are blindly repeated until they become 'fact'.... I will soon know first-hand exactly how frequently Hwange elephants are giving birth, and from what age, to then be able to dispel some of the myths.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“We carry eternal optimism around in our wallets, along with our trillion-dollar notes. It's starting to feel like we're all lunatics living in an asylum.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“Only now do I understand how someone might never go back to a place so well loved but where so much heartache was endured.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“Where once I could taste hope, now I can taste only neglect and it is bitter.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“Things will never change unless we properly expose these bullies. I'm no use to the elephants as a martyr but I can't lie low out of fear.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“Words from Karen Blixen's book, Out of Africa, subsequently play over and over in my mind: 'If I know a song of Africa ... does Africa know a song of me?... would the eagles of Ngong look out for me?
Will Hwange's bateleur eagles keep looking out for me?”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“I'd discovered powers of resilience that I didn't know I had.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“I feel an unspeakable despair. I close my eyes and weep in grief and frustration at what is going on around me.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“These days I'm always relieved to see broken tusks, making these elephants less attractive to the sport-hunters and poachers.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“These memorable displays are made even more special for me because I know who the elephants are, and am able to interpret their interactions with one another. I don't know for sure why they meet up like this, but I like to think they're simply having a party, by infrasonic invitation only; celebrating their close bonds, and catching up on gossip after long periods apart.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“an ancient 4x4, a pair of binoculars, a camera, a tyre compressor pump, jumper leads and a can opener are my most treasured possessions.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“Friends who witness these encounters suspect that Lady, wild and free, has bestowed on me the status of 'honorary elephant'. I am moved beyond words.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“elephants are to me the essence of wild freedom. I am adamant that they do not deserve such agony and disturbance at the hands of humans.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“I”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“elephants giggle in infrasound.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“In the right light, an elephant’s lower eyelid takes on the colour of the ocean.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man’.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“families that show love, respect and good attitude probably better than human beings’, and that the ‘wilderness is perhaps more civilised than what we call civilisation’. He concludes that lessons learnt from the elephants may ‘be the answer to mankind’.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness

“his life will achieve . . . something which is greater than happiness and unhappiness: and that is meaning’.”
― Sharon Pincott, Elephant Dawn: The Inspirational Story of Thirteen Years Living with Elephants in the African Wilderness