You can live a lifetime and at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself.
BERYL MARKHAMIt 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.
More Beryl Markham Quotes
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There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa.
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Success feeds confidence.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin’s lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it.
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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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She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation, but yields her own desires gently.
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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.
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It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy.
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A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.
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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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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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[Elephants] are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves.
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That’s what makes death so hard–unsatisfied curiosity
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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.
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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.
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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.
BERYL MARKHAM