Top 69 Beryl Markham Quotes
#1. 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.
Beryl Markham
#2. In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.
Beryl Markham
#3. To her all things are poignantly lacking - but she is incapable of desiring anything.
Beryl Markham
#4. It is really this that makes death so hard - curiosity unsatisfied.
Beryl Markham
#5. Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?
Beryl Markham
#6. Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice
Beryl Markham
#8. Hardly Africa. Not a stone has a familiar cast; the sky and the earth meet like strangers, and the touch of the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things. Such is Molo. Its first glance presages the character I later learn - a stern country,
Beryl Markham
#9. A lovely horse is always an experience ... It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words.
Beryl Markham
#10. 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.
Beryl Markham
#11. The character of a dwelling, like that of a man, grows slowly.
Beryl Markham
#13. It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation's hour had left it.
Beryl Markham
#14. I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny
Beryl Markham
#15. How is it possible to bring order out of memory?
Beryl Markham
#16. Atop their gleaming backs the jockeys look like gaudy baubles, secured with strings. They bob up and down, they rise, lean forward, then settle again.
Beryl Markham
#17. 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.
Beryl Markham
#18. Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it.
Beryl Markham
#19. 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.
Beryl Markham
#20. ...our hostess backed out of the room, grinning vapidly. She had long since forgotten the meaning of a smile, but the physical ability to make the gesture remained. I felt that the grin...would shatter if it were touched and fall to the floor in pieces.
Beryl Markham
#22. 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.
Beryl Markham
#23. 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.
Beryl Markham
#24. All the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.
Beryl Markham
#26. (On Baron von Blixen
Six feet of amiable Swede and, to my knowledge, the toughest, most durable White Hunter ever to snicker at the fanfare of safari or to shoot a charging buffalo between the eyes while debating whether his sundown drink will be gin or whisky.
Beryl Markham
#27. If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.
Beryl Markham
#28. (This place) presumed to be a town then, but was hardly more than a word under a tin roof.
Beryl Markham
#29. (On vultures
... those false but democratic mourners at every casual bier ...
Beryl Markham
#30. There is respect for a heart like yours, and if its beating stop, the spirit lives to guard the ways you wandered.
Beryl Markham
#31. That's what makes death so hard
unsatisfied curiosity
Beryl Markham
#32. Names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart.
Beryl Markham
#33. if I were, even now, without either a dog or a horse in my keeping, I should feel I had lost contact with the earth.
Beryl Markham
#34. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know, that no horizon is so far you cannot get above it or beyond it.
Beryl Markham
#35. 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.
Beryl Markham
#36. [The lion] began to contemplate me with a kind of quiet premeditation, like that of a slow-witted man fondling an unaccustomed thought.
Beryl Markham
#37. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all.
Beryl Markham
#38. [I]t is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.
Beryl Markham
#39. 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.
Beryl Markham
#40. All this, and discontent too! Otherwise, why am I sitting here dreaming of England? Why am I gazing at this campfire like a lost should seeking a hope when all that I love is at my wingtips? Because I am curious. Because I am incorrigibly, now, a wanderer.
Beryl Markham
#41. I learned the tyranny of figures before I knew the value of a pound.
Beryl Markham
#42. The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.
Beryl Markham
#43. The mechanistic age impended over an horizon not hostile, but silently indifferent.
Beryl Markham
#44. Life had a different shape; it had new branches and some of the old branches were dead.
Beryl Markham
#45. The Old Days, the Lost Days
in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened to those certain songs.
Beryl Markham
#46. 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.
Beryl Markham
#47. 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.
Beryl Markham
#48. 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.
Beryl Markham
#49. A map says to you.
Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not ...
I am the earth in the palm of your hand.
Beryl Markham
#50. A fine job of work and a fine colt. Shall I reward you or Coquette - or both?
Beryl Markham
#51. 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.
Beryl Markham
#52. Conformation ... but not much else. Breeding, but too small a heart. You saw it everywhere - in men, in horses, and in women.
Beryl Markham
#53. The sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.
Beryl Markham
#54. After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work
Beryl Markham
#55. 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. These things I still have, I remind myself - and shall have until I leave them.
Beryl Markham
#56. We laughed at some things because we had grown so much older; we were serious about others because we were still so young.
Beryl Markham
#57.
Still, not to be English is hardly regarded as a fatal deficiency even by the English, though grave enough to warrant sympathy.
Beryl Markham
#58. An experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.
Beryl Markham
#59. 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.
Beryl Markham
#60. The rain feeds the seed, and the seed the mill. When the rain stops, the mill wheels stop - or, if they continue to turn, they grind despair for the man who owns them. My father owned them.
Beryl Markham
#61. No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade,
Beryl Markham
#62. A domesticated lion is only an unnatural lion - and whatever is unnatural is untrustworthy.
Beryl Markham
#63. Memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will ...
Beryl Markham
#64. Each humid, tropic day is stillborn, and does not breathe, however lustily pregnant the night that gave it birth.
Beryl Markham
#65. (Quoting her friend Tom Black on an amateur hunter's injury
Lion, rifles
and stupidity.
Beryl Markham
#66. It seems characteristic of the mind of man that the repression of what is natural to humans must be abhorred, but that what is natural to an infinitely more natural animal must be confined within the bounds of a reason peculiar only to men
more peculiar sometimes than seems reasonable at all.
Beryl Markham
#68. 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.
Beryl Markham
#69. (This town) doesn't look like anything; it isn't anything. Its five tin-roofed huts cling to the skinny tracks of the Uganda Railway like parasites on a vine.
Beryl Markham
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