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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

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

Adventure Air Knowing
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

Men Riddled Water Years
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.
BERYL MARKHAM

Believe Dog Horse Universal
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
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
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.
BERYL MARKHAM

Mean Morning Sleep
The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all.
BERYL MARKHAM

Cards Deck Loneliness Natural
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

Across Disturbing Making Putting Volume
You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself.
BERYL MARKHAM

Book Dog Loneliness
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
Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it.
BERYL MARKHAM

Paper Silence Steel
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.
BERYL MARKHAM

Darkness Men Night Real
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
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

Dignity Fall Nature Pain
I have a trunk containing continents.
BERYL MARKHAM

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

Demand Parent Views

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

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

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Popular Authors

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