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 MARKHAMMemory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will.
More Beryl Markham Quotes
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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 -
Success feeds confidence.
BERYL MARKHAM -
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.
BERYL MARKHAM -
What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour 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. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend.
BERYL MARKHAM -
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 -
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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Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?
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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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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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There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing
BERYL MARKHAM -
Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.
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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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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.
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Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it.
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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.
BERYL MARKHAM







