Beryl Markham Quotes & Sayings

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

There are many Africas. — 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

We laughed at some things because we had grown so much older; we were serious about others because we were still so young. — Beryl Markham

(This town) doesn't look like anything; it isn't anything. Its five tin-roofed huts cling to the skinny tracks of the Uganda Railway like parasites on a vine. — Beryl Markham

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

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

(On vultures
... those false but democratic mourners at every casual bier ... — 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

A fine job of work and a fine colt. Shall I reward you or Coquette - or both? — Beryl Markham

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

(This place) presumed to be a town then, but was hardly more than a word under a tin roof. — Beryl Markham

You could expect many things of God at night when the campfire burned before the tents. You could look through and beyond the veils of scarlet and see shadows of the world as God first made it and hear the voices of the beasts He put there. It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation's hour had left it.
In a sense it was formless. When the low stars shone over it and the moon clothed it in silver fog, it was the way the firmament must have been when the waters had gone and the night of the Fifth Day had fallen on creatures still bewildered by the wonder of their being. It was an empty world because no man had yet joined sticks to make a house or scratched the earth to make a road or embedded the transient symbols of his artifice in the clean horizon. But it was not a sterile world. It held the genesis of life and lay deep and anticipant under the sky. — 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

Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic. — Beryl Markham

(Quoting her friend Tom Black on an amateur hunter's injury
Lion, rifles
and stupidity. — 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

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

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

Each humid, tropic day is stillborn, and does not breathe, however lustily pregnant the night that gave it birth. — Beryl Markham

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

Names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart. — Beryl Markham

How is it possible to bring order out of memory? — Beryl Markham

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

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

Before such a flight it was the anticipation of aloneness more than any thought of physical danger that used to haunt me a little and make me wonder sometimes if mine was the the most wonderful job in the world after all. I always concluded that lonely or not it was still free from the curse of boredom. — Beryl Markham

From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic. — Beryl Markham

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. — Beryl Markham

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

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

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

Success breeds confidence. — 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

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

A life has to move or it stagnates. — 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

None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones
not even the lion.
He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment.
The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him without killing him, and then turned the unsconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime. — Beryl Markham

It is really this that makes death so hard - curiosity unsatisfied. — Beryl Markham

I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny — Beryl Markham

There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa
and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa ... Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.
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. — Beryl Markham

I have a trunk containing continents. — Beryl Markham

I learned the tyranny of figures before I knew the value of a pound. — 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

The only disadvantage in surviving a dangerous experience lies in the fact that your story of it tends to be anticlimactic. You can never carry on right through the point where whatever it is that threatens your life actually takes it
and get anybody to believe you. The world is full of sceptics. — Beryl Markham

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

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

I had never realized before how quickly men deteriorate without razors and clean shirts. They are like potted plants that go to weed unless they are pruned and tended daily. A single day's growth beard makes a man look careless; two days', derelict; and four days', polluted. Blix and Weston hadn't shaved for three. — Beryl Markham

All this, and discontent too! Otherwise, why am I sitting here dreaming of England? Why am I gazing at this campfire like a lost should seeking a hope when all that I love is at my wingtips? Because I am curious. Because I am incorrigibly, now, a wanderer. — Beryl Markham

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

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. These things I still have, I remind myself - and shall have until I leave them. — Beryl Markham

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

The character of a dwelling, like that of a man, grows slowly. — Beryl Markham

To venture ... close (to a lion) on foot ... would mean the sudden shattering of any kindly belief that the similarity of the lion and the pussy cat goes much beyond their whiskers. But then, since men still live by the sword, it's a little optimistic to expect the lion to withdraw his claws, handicapped as he is by his inability to read our better effusions about the immorality of bloodshed. — Beryl Markham

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. Suspecting it, I have nevertheless depended on this tolerance all my life, and if I were, even now, without either a dog or a horse in my keeping, I should feel I had lost contact with the earth. I should be as concerned as a Buddhist monk having lost contact with Nirvana. — 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

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), who 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

Toombo. Look at the roundness of your belly. Look at the heaviness of your legs!' Toombo looks. 'God makes fat birds and small birds, trees that are wide and trees that are thin, like wattle. He makes big kernels and little kernels. I am a big kernel. One does not argue with God.' The theosophism defeats Otieno; — Beryl Markham

if I were, even now, without either a dog or a horse in my keeping, I should feel I had lost contact with the earth. — 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. 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. 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

There is a legend that elephant dispose of their dead in secret burial grounds and that none of these has ever been discovered. In support of this, there is only the fact that the body of an elephant, unless he had been trapped or shot in his tracks, has rarely been found. What happens to the old and diseased?
Not only natives, but many white settlers, have supported for years the legend (if it is a legend) that elephant will carry their wounded and their sick hundreds of miles, if necessary, to keep them out of the hands of their enemies. And it is said that elephant never forget (206). — Beryl Markham

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 it's coming is lost. You fly forever, weary with an invariable scene, and when you are at last released from its monotony, you remember nothing of it because there was nothing there. — 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

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

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

There is respect for a heart like yours, and if its beating stop, the spirit lives to guard the ways you wandered. — Beryl Markham

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

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

A domesticated lion is only an unnatural lion - and whatever is unnatural is untrustworthy. — 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

No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, — Beryl Markham

The rain feeds the seed, and the seed the mill. When the rain stops, the mill wheels stop - or, if they continue to turn, they grind despair for the man who owns them. My father owned them. — Beryl Markham

He knows that there will be days ahead, long, tedious days which have no real beginning or ending, but which run together into night and out of it without changing color, or sound, or meaning. He will lie in his bed feeling the minutes and the hours pass through his body like an endless ribbon of pain because time becomes pain then. Light and darkness become pain; all his senses exist only to receive it, to transmit to his mind again and again, with ceaseless repetition, the simple fact that now he is dying. — Beryl Markham

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

...our hostess backed out of the room, grinning vapidly. She had long since forgotten the meaning of a smile, but the physical ability to make the gesture remained. I felt that the grin...would shatter if it were touched and fall to the floor in pieces. — Beryl Markham

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

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

And still it was gone. Seeing it again could not be living it again. You can always rediscover an old path and wander over it, but the best yo an do then is say, 'Ah, yes, know this turning!'
or remind yourself that, while you remember that unforgettable valley, the valley no longer remembers you. — Beryl Markham

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, — 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

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

An experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger. — 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

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

Hardly Africa. Not a stone has a familiar cast; the sky and the earth meet like strangers, and the touch of the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things. Such is Molo. Its first glance presages the character I later learn - a stern country, — Beryl Markham

Look at a seed in the palm of a farmer's hand. It can be blown away with a puff of breath and that is the end of it. But it holds three lives - its own, that of the man who may feed on its increase, and that of the man who lives by its culture. If the seed die, these men will not, but they may not live as they always had. They may be affected because the seed is dead; — Beryl Markham

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

It seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of towns, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hole, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit. — Beryl Markham

Atop their gleaming backs the jockeys look like gaudy baubles, secured with strings. They bob up and down, they rise, lean forward, then settle again. — Beryl Markham

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

Elephant, beyond the fact that their size and conformation are aesthetically more suited to the treading of this earth than our angular informity, have an average intelligence comparable to our own. Of course they 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

To her all things are poignantly lacking - but she is incapable of desiring anything. — Beryl Markham

[I]t is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday. — 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 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

The Old Days, the Lost Days
in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened to those certain songs. — Beryl Markham

It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation's hour had left it. — Beryl Markham

Still, not to be English is hardly regarded as a fatal deficiency even by the English, though grave enough to warrant sympathy. — Beryl Markham