An Elephant in My Kitchen Quotes

“Living in the bush teaches you that life is a magnificent cycle of birth and death, and nothing showed me that more powerfully than when Nana gave birth to a beautiful baby boy around the time of Lawrence’s passing.

Of course I named him Lolo.”
― Francoise Malby-Anthony, An Elephant in My Kitchen: What the Herd Taught Me about Love, Courage and Survival

“It’s such a reminder about life itself. We can never know what’s around the corner and it makes it all the more urgent to relish precious moments of peace when they come our way.”
― Françoise Malby-Anthony, An Elephant in My Kitchen

“when tragedy hits, we have to find a way to give it reason.”
― Françoise Malby-Anthony, An Elephant in My Kitchen

“I had a lot to learn, but tragedy and adversity have ways of opening new roads of hope and opportunity, and I slowly found my feet. There were moments when I felt I was drowning, and others when I had such clarity about what to do. I clung to the image of a ship navigating dangerous seas and was determined to survive the storm.”
― Francoise Malby Anthony, An Elephant in My Kitchen

“Ubuntu is a powerful Zulu word that means we don’t exist on our own and that we are never alone because we are part of a bigger connected world of humanity. Before coming to South Africa, I lived in a society where being an individual was more valued than being part of a community. It’s not like that here. In traditional Africa, ‘us’ is more meaningful than ‘me’. Ubuntu means that I am who I am only because of who we all are together.”
― Francoise Malby Anthony, An Elephant in My Kitchen

“I don’t believe in the clichéd platitude that everything happens for a reason but I believe with all my heart that, when tragedy hits, we have to find a way to give it reason. To do our best to let good come out of it.”
― Francoise Malby Anthony, An Elephant in My Kitchen

“walked in a disorganized jumble to the front of the house, stayed there for a few minutes then shouldered their way to the back of the house again, never grazing, always moving. ‘They were disturbed but I had no idea why. I thought maybe they had had a run-in with poachers. When I got closer, I saw the telltale streaks of stress on the sides of their faces, even the babies’,’ Promise said afterwards, rubbing his own cheek in amazement. An elephant’s temporal gland sits between its eye and ear, and secretes liquid when the animal is stressed, which can create the mistaken impression that it is crying. The elephants at our entrance weren’t crying, but the dark moist lines running down their massive cheeks showed that something had deeply affected them. After about forty minutes, they lined up at the fence separating our home from the bush and their gentle communication started. Solemn rumbles rolled through the air, the same low-frequency language they always used with Lawrence. Mabula, the herd’s dominant bull, paced”
― Francoise Malby-Anthony, An Elephant in My Kitchen