In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.
BERYL MARKHAMWhat a child does not know and does not want to know of race and color 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.
More Beryl Markham Quotes
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There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing
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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.
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Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?
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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.
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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.
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A word grows to a thought – a thought to an idea – an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveler loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A lovely horse is always an experience…. It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Conformation … but not much else. Breeding, but too small a heart. You saw it everywhere – in men, in horses, and in women.
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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 that will be an airborne life.
BERYL MARKHAM -
What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and color 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.
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.
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[The lion] began to contemplate me with a kind of quiet premeditation, like that of a slow-witted man fondling an unaccustomed thought.
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If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.
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That’s what makes death so hard–unsatisfied curiosity
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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.
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You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself.
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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 -
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.
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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