Beryl Markham famous quotes

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.
-- Beryl Markham

#Moving On #Distance #Believe

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

#Horse #Emotional #Lovely

You can live a lifetime and at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself.
-- Beryl Markham

#Knowledge #People #Lifetime

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Dream #Children #Men

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

#Distance #Clouds #Years

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

#Inspirational #Thinking #Errors

Success breeds confidence.
-- Beryl Markham

#Strong Women #Strong

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

#Dream #Hope #Children

The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.
-- Beryl Markham

#Way #Needles #Organized

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

#Wisdom #Perseverance #Business

It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.
-- Beryl Markham

#Men #Elephants #Rivers

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

#Hands #Doubt #Maps

If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.
-- Beryl Markham

#Inspired #Guilty #Hunches

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Journey #Ideas #Want

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Nature #Pain #Fall

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Children #Good Friend #Boys

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Nature #Animal #Mountain

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Children #Men #Race

You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents - each man to see what the other looked like.
-- Beryl Markham

#Dog #Loneliness #Book

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Stars #Men #Doors

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

#Men #Greatness #Arrogance

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Dog #Horse #Believe

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

#Fun #Age #Goldfish

After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work
-- 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 that will be an airborne life.
-- Beryl Markham

#Stars #Men #Curves

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

#Mean #Silence #Different

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

#Dark #Light #Rocks

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

#Men #Years #Water

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

#People #Giving #Balance

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

#Work #Dignity #Achieve

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

#Knights #Bored #Sage

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Men #Civilization #Cities

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Integrity #War #Knowing

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

#Men #Hands #Mind

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

#Flying #Boards #Instruments

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

#Horse #Heart #Men

memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will ...
-- Beryl Markham

#Memories #Drug #You Again

I suppose if there were a part of the world in which mastodon still lived, somebody would design a new gun, and men, in their eternal impudence, would hunt mastodon as they now hunt elephant. Impudence seems to be the word. At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.
-- Beryl Markham

#Gun #Men #Elephants

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

#Weed #Roots #Essence

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

#Adventure #Knowing #Air

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Home #People #Hunters

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

#Wind #Law #Understanding

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Character #Yield #Hands

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Wall #Responsibility #Good Friend

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Believe #Men #Hands

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

#Littles #Good Omens #Ends

There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa...
-- Beryl Markham

#Book

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

#Land #Voice #Fundamentals

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

#Curiosity #Unsatisfied

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

#Change #Different #Shapes

[Elephants] are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves - Nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin's lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it. This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets - and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other.
-- Beryl Markham

#Gun #Winning #Elephants

[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

#Men #Lions #Quiet

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

#Moving #Thinking #Yesterday

there are many Africas.
-- 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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Lonely #Men #Lips

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

#Views #Parent #Demand

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.
-- Beryl Markham

#Eye #Home #Fighting