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 MARKHAMAfrica 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.
More Beryl Markham Quotes
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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.
BERYL MARKHAM -
A lovely horse is always an experience…. It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words.
BERYL MARKHAM -
Success breeds confidence.
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.
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 -
She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation, but yields her own desires gently.
BERYL MARKHAM -
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 -
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.
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 -
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 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 -
There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa.
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 -
No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work.
BERYL MARKHAM







