Beryl Markham Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Beryl Markham
I could never tell where inspiration begins and impulse leaves off. I suppose the answer is in the outcome. If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.

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

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

Beryl Markham
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
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
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays 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.

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

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

Beryl Markham