Beryl Markham Quotes

There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa.

After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work

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.

all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.

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

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

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.

But the soul of Africa, its integrity, the slow inexorable pulse of its life, is its own and of such singular rhythm that no outsider, unless steeped from childhood in its endless, even beat, can ever hope to experience it, except only as a bystander might experience a Masai war dance knowing nothing of its music nor the meaning of its steps.

To an eagle or to an owl or to a rabbit, 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.

there are many Africas.

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.

The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all.