Beryl Markham

Literary Birthday – 26 October – Beryl Markham

Beryl Markham was born 26 October 1902 and died 3 August 1986.

Nine Quotes

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know, that no horizon is so far you cannot get above it or beyond it.
  4. 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’.
  5. A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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 traveller loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.
  9. There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa — and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.

Beryl Markham was a British-born Kenyan author, aviator, adventurer, and racehorse trainer. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. She wrote about her adventures in her memoir, West with the Night.

Source for image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beryl_Markham_1936.jpg

Agence de presse Meurisse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 26th October 2017
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