Beryl Markham Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How is it possible to bring order out of memory?

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

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

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

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

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

That's what makes death so hard
unsatisfied curiosity

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny

[The lion] began to contemplate me with a kind of quiet premeditation, like that of a slow-witted man fondling an unaccustomed thought.

Success breeds confidence.

There are many Africas.

A life has to move or it stagnates.

Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.

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.

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

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

A map says to you.
Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not ...
I am the earth in the palm of your hand.

I have a trunk containing continents.

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,

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.

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

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

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

I learned what every dreaming child needs to know, that no horizon is so far you cannot get above it or beyond it.

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

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