Beryl Markham Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  63 Copy quote

• 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

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.204, Open Road Media

  52 Copy quote

• 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, Justice

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.14, Open Road Media

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• 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

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.265, Open Road Media

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• 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

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.170, Open Road Media

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• 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.

  Beryl Markham

  Morning, Mean, Sleep

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.58, Open Road Media

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• 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

  Beryl Markham (2015). “West With The Night”, p.182, Hachette UK

  38 Copy quote

• 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

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.14, Open Road Media

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• 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

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.171, Open Road Media

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• After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work

  Beryl Markham

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.150, Open Road Media

  7 Copy quote

• 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, Race, Land

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• 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.

  Beryl Markham

  Yesterday, Way, I Have Learned

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.146, Open Road Media

  5 Copy quote

• The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.

  Beryl Markham

  Way, Needles, Needle In A Haystack

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.235, Open Road Media

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• Success breeds confidence.

  Beryl Markham

  Inspirational, Success, Confidence

  Beryl Markham (1994). “The Illustrated West with the Night”, Stewart, Tabori, & Chang

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

  Beryl Markham

  Horse, Cowboy, Emotional

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.133, Open Road Media

  38 Copy quote

• 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

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.272, Open Road Media

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.109, Open Road Media

  3 Copy quote

• 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

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.102, Open Road Media

  7 Copy quote

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

  Beryl Markham

  Memories, Drug, You Again

  Beryl Markham (1994). “The Illustrated West with the Night”, Stewart, Tabori, & Chang

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.146, Open Road Media

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.204, Open Road Media

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.55, Open Road Media

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• 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

  War, Integrity, Knowing Nothing

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.19, Open Road Media

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• There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

  Beryl Markham

  Children, Gay, Men

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.58, Open Road Media

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

  Beryl Markham

  Curiosity, Hard, Unsatisfied

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