Best 72 quotes of Beryl Markham on MyQuotes

Beryl Markham

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home'. It is all these things but one thing - it is never dull.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    Africa is never the same to anyone who leaves it and returns again. It is not a land of change, but it is a land of moods and its moods are numberless. It is not fickle, but because it has mothered not only men, but races, and cradles not only cities, but civilizations - and seen them die, and seen new ones born again - Africa can be dispassionate, indifferent, warm, or cynical, replete with the weariness of too much wisdom.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    A lovely horse is always an experience.... It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    A man can be riddled with malaria for years on end, with its chills and its fevers and its nightmares, but if one day he sees that the water from his kidneys is black, he knows he will not leave that place again, wherever he is, or wherever he hoped to be.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    A map in the hands of a pilot is a testimony of a man's faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is not like a printed page that bears mere words, ambiguous and artful, and whose most believing reader - even whose author, perhaps - must allow in his mind a recess for doubt. A map says to you, 'Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.' It says, 'I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    A map says to you. Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not... I am the earth in the palm of your hand.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    A word grows to a thought – a thought to an idea – an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveler loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    But, for a little while, this is the place for us -- a good place too--a place of good omen, a place of beginning things--and of ending things I never thought would end.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    But the soul of Africa, its integrity, the slow inexorable pulse of its life, is its own and of such singular rhythm that no outsider, unless steeped from childhood in its endless, even beat, can ever hope to experience it, except only as a bystander might experience a Masai war dance knowing nothing of its music nor the meaning of its steps.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    Conformation ... but not much else. Breeding, but too small a heart. You saw it everywhere - in men, in horses, and in women.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    Denys (Finch-Hatton) has been written about before and he will be written about again. If someone has not already said it, someone will say that he was a great man who never achieved greatness, and this will not only be trite, but wrong; he was a great man who never achieved arrogance.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    For all professional pilots there exists a kind of guild, without charter and without by-laws. it demands no requirements for inclusion save an understanding of the wind, the compass, the rudder, and fair fellowship.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead. She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation, but yields her own desires gently.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are burried deep-leave it anyway except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    I have lifted my plane . . . for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the Earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of first-born adventure.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    I know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains - the drab and dowdy digger in the earth. He is the uncomely but intrepid defender of family, home, and bourgeois convention, and he will fight anything of any size that intrudes upon his smug existence. ... His eyes are small and lightless and capable of but one expression - suspicion. What he does not understand, he suspects, and what he suspects, he fights.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    I look at my yesterdays for months past, and find them as good a lot of yesterdays as anybody might want. I sit there in the firelight and see them all. The hours that made them were good, and so were the moments that made the hours. I have had responsibilities and work, dangers and pleasure, good friends, and a world without walls to live in.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    In Africa people learn to serve each other. They live on credit balances of little favors that they give and may, one day, ask to have returned.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    In the family of continents, Africa is the silent, the brooding sister, courted for centuries by knight-errant empires - rejecting them one by one and severally, because she is too sage and a little bored with the importunity of it all.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    Life had a different shape; it had new branches and some of the old branches were dead.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    Memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    No human pursuit achieves dignity unless it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things - the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold - were false to you.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day this will be an airborne life. But by then men will have forgotten how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are carefully promoted to a familiarity with labelled buttons, and in whose minds knowledge of the sky and the wind and the way of weather will be extraneous as passing fiction.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    Roots of the weed sucked first life from the genesis of earth and hold the essence of it still. Always the weed returns; the cultured plant retreats before it.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    Success breeds confidence.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    Talk lives in a man’s head, but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of many men there is nothing to keep it company - and so talk goes out through the lips.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    That's what makes death so hard--unsatisfied curiosity

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    [The lion] began to contemplate me with a kind of quiet premeditation, like that of a slow-witted man fondling an unaccustomed thought.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    There's an old adage," he said, "translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages -- "Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    The world grows bigger as the light leaves it. There are no boundaries and no landmarks. The trees and the rocks and the anthills begin to disappear, one by one, whisked away under the magical cloak of evening.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    To an eagle or to an owl or to a rabbit, man must seem a masterful and yet a forlorn animal; he has but two friends. In his almost universal unpopularity he points out, with pride, that these two are the dog and the horse. He believes, with an innocence peculiar to himself, that they are equally proud of this alleged confraternity. He says, 'Look at my two noble friends -- they are dumb, but they are loyal.' I have for years suspected that they are only tolerant.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    To me, desert has the quality of darkness; none of the shapes you see in it are real or permanent. Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless, and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility. When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of its coming is lost.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told -- that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    We fly, but we have not 'conquered' the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick fall across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know -- that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and color and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), wo sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.

  • By Anonym
    Beryl Markham

    Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?