Quotes from Beryl Markham

Before such a flight it was the anticipation of aloneness more than any thought of physical danger that used to haunt me a little and make me wonder sometimes if mine was the the most wonderful job in the world after all. I always concluded that lonely or not it was still free from the curse of boredom.

To her all things are poignantly lacking — but she is incapable of desiring anything.

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;

It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation's hour had left it.

Names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart.

Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.

I learned the tyranny of figures before I knew the value of a pound.

It seems characteristic of the mind of man that the repression of what is natural to humans must be abhorred, but that what is natural to an infinitely more natural animal must be confined within the bounds of a reason peculiar only to men -- more peculiar sometimes than seems reasonable at all.

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

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.

Each humid, tropic day is stillborn, and does not breathe, however lustily pregnant the night that gave it birth.

an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.

the character of a dwelling, like that of a man, grows slowly.

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

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.

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

Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it.

Atop their gleaming backs the jockeys look like gaudy baubles, secured with strings. They bob up and down, they rise, lean forward, then settle again.

Life had a different shape; it had new branches and some of the old branches were dead. It had followed the constant pattern of discard and growth that all lives follow.

Night flying over charted country by the aid of instruments and radio guidance can still be a lonely business, but to fly in unbroken darkness without even the cold companionship of a pair of ear-phones or the knowledge that somewhere ahead are lights and life and a well-marked airport is something more than just lonely.

Tail winds and happy landings.

Sin duda, es eso lo que hace de la muerte algo tan duro: la curiosidad insatisfecha

a fine job of work and a fine colt. Shall I reward you or Coquette — or both?

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;