Beryl Markham Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

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

  16 Copy quote

• 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

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

  12 Copy quote

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

  Beryl Markham

  Silence, Steel, Paper

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.162, Open Road Media

  7 Copy quote

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

  Beryl Markham

  Work, Dignity, Achieve

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.308, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  McDougal, Beryl Markham (1997). “West with the Night”, McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  Greatness, Men, Arrogance

  McDougal, Beryl Markham (1997). “West with the Night”, McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.227, Open Road Media

  21 Copy quote

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

  Beryl Markham

  Curiosity, Hard, Unsatisfied

  21 Copy quote

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

  Beryl Markham

  Mean, Silence, Different

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

  13 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

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Animal, Men, Elephants

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.227, Open Road Media

  8 Copy quote

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

  Beryl Markham

  Inspirational, Thinking, Errors

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.76, Open Road Media

  10 Copy quote

• 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, Littles

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

  12 Copy quote

• 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, Essence, Roots

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.13, Open Road Media

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Beryl Markham

  Loneliness, Vanity, Tools

  7 Copy quote

• There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa.

  Beryl Markham

  Book

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.13, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

• 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

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

  17 Copy quote

• 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

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

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Beryl Markham

  Real, Night, Men

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.279, Open Road Media

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  McDougal, Beryl Markham (1997). “West with the Night”, McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Beryl Markham (1988). “The splendid outcast: Beryl Markham's African stories”, Laurel

  15 Copy quote

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

  Beryl Markham

  Loneliness, Natural, Deck Of Cards

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

  8 Copy quote

• 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, Future, Men

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

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.35, Open Road Media

  25 Copy quote

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