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Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice

Beryl Markham

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Beryl Markham
Age: 83 †
Born: 1902
Born: October 26
Died: 1986
Died: August 3
Aircraft Pilot
Author
Horse Trainer
Writer
Leicester
England
Beryl Markham
Africa
Fundamental
Fundamentals
Repository
Land
Barbaric
Values
Unfamiliar
Less
Primaries
Voice
Primary
Wilderness

More quotes by Beryl Markham

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The world grows bigger as the light leaves it. There are no boundaries and no landmarks. The trees and the rocks and the anthills begin to disappear, one by one, whisked away under the magical cloak of evening.
Beryl Markham
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No human pursuit achieves dignity unless 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.
Beryl Markham
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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, but yields her own desires gently.
Beryl Markham
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Success feeds confidence.
Beryl Markham
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In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.
Beryl Markham
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Conformation ... but not much else. Breeding, but too small a heart. You saw it everywhere - in men, in horses, and in women.
Beryl Markham
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all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.
Beryl Markham
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Roots of the weed sucked first life from the genesis of earth and hold the essence of it still. Always the weed returns the cultured plant retreats before it.
Beryl Markham
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No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work.
Beryl Markham
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the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.
Beryl Markham
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Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.
Beryl Markham
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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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For all professional pilots there exists a kind of guild, without charter and without by-laws. it demands no requirements for inclusion save an understanding of the wind, the compass, the rudder, and fair fellowship.
Beryl Markham
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After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work
Beryl Markham
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But, for a little while, this is the place for us -- a good place too--a place of good omen, a place of beginning things--and of ending things I never thought would end.
Beryl Markham
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Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it.
Beryl Markham
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A lovely horse is always an experience.... It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words.
Beryl Markham
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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
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Talk lives in a man’s head, but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of many men there is nothing to keep it company - and so talk goes out through the lips.
Beryl Markham
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I suppose if there were a part of the world in which mastodon still lived, somebody would design a new gun, and men, in their eternal impudence, would hunt mastodon as they now hunt elephant. Impudence seems to be the word. At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.
Beryl Markham