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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.

Beryl Markham

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
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
Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?
BERYL MARKHAM

Errors Inspirational Thinking
Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it.
BERYL MARKHAM

Paper Silence Steel
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
After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work
BERYL MARKHAM

Hope More Work
Success breeds confidence.
BERYL MARKHAM

Confidence Inspirational Success
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
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.
BERYL MARKHAM

Cloud Future Hour Lived Passed Remember
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 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
A lovely horse is always an experience…. It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words.
BERYL MARKHAM

Cowboy Emotional Horse
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
It is not fickle, but because it has mothered not only men, but races, and cradles not only cities, but civilizations – and seen them die, and seen new ones born again – Africa can be dispassionate, indifferent, warm, or cynical, replete with the weariness of too much wisdom.
BERYL MARKHAM

Again Born Civilization Country
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

Deathly Elephant Species Sting
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

[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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[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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