Beryl Markham

I have lifted my plane . . . for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from…

— Beryl Markham

“(Quoting her friend Tom Black on an amateur hunter's injury:) "Lion, rifles -- and stupidity.”

— Beryl Markham

“The only disadvantage in surviving a dangerous experience lies in the fact that your story of it tends to be anticlimactic. You…

— Beryl Markham

“All this, and discontent too! Otherwise, why am I sitting here dreaming of England? Why am I gazing at this campfire like…

— Beryl Markham

We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of…

— Beryl Markham

there are many Africas.

— Beryl Markham

Talk lives in a man’s head, but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of many men there is nothing…

— Beryl Markham

There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano…

— Beryl Markham

[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

“From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of…

— Beryl Markham

But, for a little while, this is the place for us -- a good place too--a place of good omen, a place…

— Beryl Markham

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning…

— Beryl Markham

“There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa -- and as many books about it as you could read…

— Beryl Markham

There's an old adage," he said, "translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages -- "Life is…

— Beryl Markham

The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.

— Beryl Markham

the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.

— Beryl Markham

Conformation ... but not much else. Breeding, but too small a heart. You saw it everywhere - in men, in horses, and…

— Beryl Markham

In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.

— Beryl Markham

In Africa people learn to serve each other. They live on credit balances of little favors that they give and may, one…

— Beryl Markham

“To venture ... close (to a lion) on foot ... would mean the sudden shattering of any kindly belief that the similarity…

— Beryl Markham

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough…

— Beryl Markham

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing

— Beryl Markham

Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as…

— Beryl Markham

I learned what every dreaming child needs to know, that no horizon is so far you cannot get above it or beyond…

— Beryl Markham

“(On Baron von Blixen:) Six feet of amiable Swede and, to my knowledge, the toughest, most durable White Hunter ever to snicker…

— Beryl Markham