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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.

Beryl Markham

Success breeds confidence.
BERYL MARKHAM

Confidence Inspirational Success
It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy.
BERYL MARKHAM

Animals Elephant Men
This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets – and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other.
BERYL MARKHAM

Electric Elephant Pigeon Razor
[Elephants] are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves.
BERYL MARKHAM

Direction Gun One Ourselves Winning
Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?
BERYL MARKHAM

Errors Inspirational Thinking
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

Boys Children Friends Good
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.
BERYL MARKHAM

Adding Clock Machine Street Told Tyrants
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
We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup.
BERYL MARKHAM

Children Dream Men
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.
BERYL MARKHAM

Integrity Knowing Nothing War
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
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
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
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
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
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
That’s what makes death so hard–unsatisfied curiosity
BERYL MARKHAM

Curiosity Hard Unsatisfied
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
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.
BERYL MARKHAM

Land Men Moods Race Return
There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa.
BERYL MARKHAM

Book Country Many Things
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

Inclusion Law Understanding Wind
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

Ideas Journey Want
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
But, for a little while, this is the place for us — a good place too–a place of good omen, a place of beginning things–and of ending things I never thought would end.
BERYL MARKHAM

Ends Good Littles
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
I have a trunk containing continents.
BERYL MARKHAM

Containing Continents Trunks

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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