There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt.

Beryl Markham

Categorized in : Mean Morning Sleep

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.

Beryl Markham

moving-on distance believe

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are burried deep-leave it anyway except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can.

Beryl Markham

i-have-learned yesterday way

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

Beryl Markham

hope dream children

If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.

Beryl Markham

perseverance business wisdom

Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home'. It is all these things but one thing - it is never dull.

Beryl Markham

home justice people

A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.

Beryl Markham

yesterday moving thinking

I know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains - the drab and dowdy digger in the earth. He is the uncomely but intrepid defender of family, home, and bourgeois convention, and he will fight anything of any size that intrudes upon his smug existence. ... His eyes are small and lightless and capable of but one expression - suspicion. What he does not understand, he suspects, and what he suspects, he fights.

Beryl Markham

fighting eye home

A word grows to a thought – a thought to an idea – an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveler loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.

Beryl Markham

journey want ideas

There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

Beryl Markham

gay men children

You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents - each man to see what the other looked like.

Beryl Markham

loneliness dog book

A lovely horse is always an experience.... It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words.

Beryl Markham

cowboy horse emotional

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

knowing air adventure

There's an old adage," he said, "translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages -- "Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die.

Beryl Markham

goldfish age fun

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

Beryl Markham

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. It is not fickle, but because it has mothered not only men, but races, and cradles not only cities, but civilizations - and seen them die, and seen new ones born again - Africa can be dispassionate, indifferent, warm, or cynical, replete with the weariness of too much wisdom.

Beryl Markham

land race men

We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know -- that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.

Beryl Markham

dream men children

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

Beryl Markham

you-again drug memories

Life had a different shape; it had new branches and some of the old branches were dead.

Beryl Markham

shapes different change

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

yield character hands

Denys (Finch-Hatton) has been written about before and he will be written about again. If someone has not already said it, someone will say that he was a great man who never achieved greatness, and this will not only be trite, but wrong; he was a great man who never achieved arrogance.

Beryl Markham

greatness arrogance men