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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

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.
BERYL MARKHAM

Eye Fighting Home Plains
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.
BERYL MARKHAM

Children Gay Lifeless Men
It is not fickle, but because it has mothered not only men, but races, and cradles not only cities, but civilizations – and seen them die, and seen new ones born again – Africa can be dispassionate, indifferent, warm, or cynical, replete with the weariness of too much wisdom.
BERYL MARKHAM

Again Born Civilization Country
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

Deathly Elephant Species Sting
Memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will.
BERYL MARKHAM

Again Drugs Memories
the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.
BERYL MARKHAM

Dispassionate Hands Men Mind
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 Freedom Gently Liberation
There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa.
BERYL MARKHAM

Book Country Many Things
There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing
BERYL MARKHAM

Different Mean Silence
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 Tools Vanity
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

Balance Giving People
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

Clouds Distance Years
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

Adding Clock Machine Street Told Tyrants
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.
BERYL MARKHAM

Different Emptiness Rainstorm Silence
It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy.
BERYL MARKHAM

Animals Elephant Men
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

Bored Knights Littles

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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