black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

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Race

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

Lifetime
After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work
BERYL MARKHAM

More
When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of its coming is lost.
BERYL MARKHAM

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

Balance
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 Plains
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.
BERYL MARKHAM

Hand Human Being Lottery Winning Other
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.
BERYL MARKHAM

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

Errors
If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.
BERYL MARKHAM

Hunches Inspired
There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa.
BERYL MARKHAM

Many Things
There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing
BERYL MARKHAM

Mean
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.
BERYL MARKHAM