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6fc9354
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work and hope. But never hope more than you work.
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Beryl Markham |
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7958fb1
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There is respect for a heart like yours, and if its beating stop, the spirit lives to guard the ways you wandered.
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Beryl Markham |
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91bcff1
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I had never realized before how quickly men deteriorate without razors and clean shirts. They are like potted plants that go to weed unless they are pruned and tended daily.
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Beryl Markham |
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8631833
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It is really this that makes death so hard -- curiosity unsatisfied.
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Beryl Markham |
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e3f7968
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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.
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Beryl Markham |
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f39c7fc
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It seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of towns, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hole, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit.
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maps
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Beryl Markham |
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92ae803
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The mechanistic age impended over an horizon not hostile, but silently indifferent.
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Beryl Markham |
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a9fc282
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None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones -- not even the lion. He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment. The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him without killing him, and then turned the unsconscion..
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stupidity
hunting
lions
tourists
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Beryl Markham |
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804b48e
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On vultures:) "... those false but democratic mourners at every casual bier ..."
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Beryl Markham |
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78c012e
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From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I..
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ennui
boredom
urbanism
england
london
urban-life
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Beryl Markham |
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fd6f8bf
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There is a legend that elephant dispose of their dead in secret burial grounds and that none of these has ever been discovered. In support of this, there is only the fact that the body of an elephant, unless he had been trapped or shot in his tracks, has rarely been found. What happens to the old and diseased? Not only natives, but many white settlers, have supported for years the legend (if it is a legend) that elephant will carry their wo..
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Beryl Markham |
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e8017f3
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But memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will...
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Beryl Markham |
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0bfd6af
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our hostess backed out of the room, grinning vapidly. She had long since forgotten the meaning of a smile, but the physical ability to make the gesture remained. I felt that the grin...would shatter if it were touched and fall to the floor in pieces.
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Beryl Markham |
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178ee2b
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We laughed at some things because we had grown so much older; we were serious about others because we were still so young.
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Beryl Markham |
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16e2831
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How is it possible to bring order out of memory?
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Beryl Markham |
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161a006
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A life has to move or it stagnates.
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Beryl Markham |
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baeb2d7
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To venture ... close (to a lion) on foot ... would mean the sudden shattering of any kindly belief that the similarity of the lion and the pussy cat goes much beyond their whiskers. But then, since men still live by the sword, it's a little optimistic to expect the lion to withdraw his claws, handicapped as he is by his inability to read our better effusions about the immorality of bloodshed.
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killing
lions
danger
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Beryl Markham |
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dcf75bc
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It was ... disconcerting to examine your charts before a proposed flight only to find that in many cases the bulk of the terrain over which you had to fly was bluntly marked: 'UNSURVEYED.' It was as if the mapmakers had said, 'We are aware that between this spot and that one, there are several hundred thousands of acres, but until make a forced landing there, we won't know whether it is mud, desert, or jungle -- and the chances are we won..
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maps
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Beryl Markham |
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b1b94b3
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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. These things I still have, I remind myself -- and shall have until I leave them.
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Beryl Markham |
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78853e3
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love thy neighbour' is less a pious injunction than a rule for survival. If you meet one in trouble, you stop -- another time he may stop for you.
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Beryl Markham |
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57a6d8a
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This town) doesn't look like anything; it isn't anything. Its five tin-roofed huts cling to the skinny tracks of the Uganda Railway like parasites on a vine.
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small-towns
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Beryl Markham |
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4320a8f
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I knew too little of Africa to leave it, and what I knew I loved too much.
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Beryl Markham |
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6899d32
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No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade,
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Beryl Markham |
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7b0653f
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To her all things are poignantly lacking -- but she is incapable of desiring anything.
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Beryl Markham |
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0369d0a
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It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick falls across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.
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Beryl Markham |
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35aedbd
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Each humid, tropic day is stillborn, and does not breathe, however lustily pregnant the night that gave it birth.
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Beryl Markham |
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2831996
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an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.
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Beryl Markham |
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d2c6303
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the character of a dwelling, like that of a man, grows slowly.
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Beryl Markham |
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95211c0
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Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead. She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation,
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Beryl Markham |
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5b59f62
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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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Beryl Markham |
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e3d4481
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It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation's hour had left it.
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Beryl Markham |
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972df8c
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Names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart.
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Beryl Markham |
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d22401d
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The Equator runs close to the Rongai Valley, and, even at so high an altitude as this we hunted in, the belly of the earth was hot as live ash under our feet. Except for an occasional gust of fretful wind that flattened the high, corn-like grass, nothing uttered -- nothing in the valley stirred. The chirrup-like drone of grasshoppers was dead, birds left the sky unmarked. the sun reigned and there were no aspirants to his place. We stopped ..
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Beryl Markham |
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2b780ae
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I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny. It seems to get up early and go to bed very late, and it acts most generously toward the people who nudge it off the road whenever they meet it.
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inspirational
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Beryl Markham |
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727effd
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if I were, even now, without either a dog or a horse in my keeping, I should feel I had lost contact with the earth.
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Beryl Markham |
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56f3e11
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a fine job of work and a fine colt. Shall I reward you or Coquette -- or both?
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Beryl Markham |
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e57a27b
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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. He believes, with an innocence peculiar to himself, that they are equally proud of this alleged confraternity. He says, 'Look at my two noble friends -- they are dumb, but they are loyal.' I have for years suspected that they are only tolerant. Suspecting it, I ..
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Beryl Markham |
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0e23bd5
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Toombo. Look at the roundness of your belly. Look at the heaviness of your legs!' Toombo looks. 'God makes fat birds and small birds, trees that are wide and trees that are thin, like wattle. He makes big kernels and little kernels. I am a big kernel. One does not argue with God.' The theosophism defeats Otieno;
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Beryl Markham |
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f5aec33
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Look at a seed in the palm of a farmer's hand. It can be blown away with a puff of breath and that is the end of it. But it holds three lives -- its own, that of the man who may feed on its increase, and that of the man who lives by its culture. If the seed die, these men will not, but they may not live as they always had. They may be affected because the seed is dead;
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Beryl Markham |
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e719b98
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The rain feeds the seed, and the seed the mill. When the rain stops, the mill wheels stop -- or, if they continue to turn, they grind despair for the man who owns them. My father owned them.
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Beryl Markham |
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7291f46
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I learned the tyranny of figures before I knew the value of a pound.
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Beryl Markham |
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d975f96
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It is amazing what a lot of insect life goes on under your nose when you have got it an inch from the earth. I suppose it goes on in any case, but if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science. The problem of classification alone must continue to be very discouraging.
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Beryl Markham |
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02e24f8
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THE DOORYARD OF NAIROBI falls into the Athi Plains. One night I stood there and watched an aeroplane invade the stronghold of the stars. It flew high; it blotted some of them out; it trembled their flames like a hand swept over a company of candles. The drumming of the engines was as far away as the drumming of a tom-tom. Unlike a tom-tom, it changed its sound; it came closer until it filled the sky with a boastful song. There
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Beryl Markham |
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82ad7ff
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Menegai Crater overlooks the township and the lake. In the time of man it has breathed no brimstone, and barely a wisp of smoke. But in the annals of the Rift Valley which contains all this as a sea contains a coral atoll or a desert a dune, the time of man is too brief a period to deserve more than incidental recording.
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Beryl Markham |