Beryl Markham Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

She wore her beauty with a shrug as if it were an ermine wrap of which she could say, 'I suppose it is lovely, but then I've had it so long!'

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

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.

Beryl Markham
She had long since forgotten the meaning of a smile, but the physical ability to make the gesture remained.

Beryl Markham
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
Flight is just momentary escape from the eternal custody of earth.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Beryl Markham
It is amazing what a lot of insect life goes on under your nose when you have got it an inch from the earth. I suppose it goes on in any case, but if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Beryl Markham
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
The mechanistic age impended over an horizon not hostile, but silently indifferent.

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.

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

Beryl Markham
Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die.

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

Beryl Markham