Quotes from Beryl Markham

There is respect for a heart like yours, and if its beating stop, the spirit lives to guard the ways you wandered.

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.

We laughed at some things because we had grown so much older; we were serious about others because we were still so young.

work and hope. But never hope more than you work.

A life has to move or it stagnates.

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.

On vultures:) ... those false but democratic mourners at every casual bier ...

A domesticated lion is only an unnatural lion — and whatever is unnatural is untrustworthy.

But memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will...

And still it was gone. Seeing it again could not be living it again. You can always rediscover an old path and wander over it, but the best you can do then is to say, Ah, yes, I know this turning! -- or remind yourself that, while you remember that unforgettable valley, the valley no longer remembers you.

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.

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.

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.

The mechanistic age impended over an horizon not hostile, but silently indifferent.

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.

Success breeds confidence.

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.

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.

Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind - such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.

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, you see that the other things — the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold — were false to you.

I knew too little of Africa to leave it, and what I knew I loved too much.

How is it possible to bring order out of memory?

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 you make a forced landing there, we won't know whether it is mud, desert, or jungle -- and the chances are we won't know then!

It's no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change. It is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.