black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.

Beryl Markham

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
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
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
Conformation … but not much else. Breeding, but too small a heart. You saw it everywhere – in men, in horses, and in women.
BERYL MARKHAM

Heart Horse Men
You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself.
BERYL MARKHAM

Book Card Care Red Shuffle Strive
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
If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.
BERYL MARKHAM

Guilty Hunches Inspired
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 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
Africa 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.
BERYL MARKHAM

Home Justice People
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
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

Children Men Race
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
You can live a lifetime and at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself.
BERYL MARKHAM

Knowledge Lifetime People
A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.
BERYL MARKHAM

Moving Thinking Yesterday
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

Friend Good Responsibility Wall

A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Beryl Markham Quotes