Markham Quotes

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. 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

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

Because being part of him isn't just anything. It's kind of everything. ~ Melina Marchetta

Neither of us moves for a moment, locked instead in each other's eyes and in the branches of this Hill we might never finish climbing. ~ Ally Condie

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour 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. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together. ~ Beryl Markham

(On WWI:)

A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war. It seemed a laborious method of retribution, but that was the way it was being done. ...

A messenger came to the farm with a story to tell. It was not a story that meant much as stories went in those days. It was about how the war progressed in German East Africa and about a tall young man who was killed in it. ... It was an ordinary story, but Kibii and I, who knew him well, thought there was no story like it, or one as sad, and we think so now.

The young man tied his shuka on his shoulder one day and took his shield and his spear and went to war. He thought war was made of spears and shields and courage, and he brought them all.

But they gave him a gun, so he left the spear and the shield behind him and took the courage, and went where they sent him because they said this was his duty and he believed in duty. ...

He took the gun and held it the way they had told him to hold it, and walked where they told him to walk, smiling a little and looking for another man to fight.

He was shot and killed by the other man, who also believed in duty, and he was buried where he fell. It was so simple and so unimportant.

But of course it meant something to Kibii and me, because the tall young man was Kibii's father and my most special friend. Arab Maina ~ Beryl Markham

Over the course of human history, many items have briefly flourished as means of exchange, only to be demonetarized. Now, we have demonetarized money. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error? ~ Beryl Markham

Toombo. Look at the roundness of your belly. Look at the heaviness of your legs!' Toombo looks. 'God makes fat birds and small birds, trees that are wide and trees that are thin, like wattle. He makes big kernels and little kernels. I am a big kernel. One does not argue with God.' The theosophism defeats Otieno; ~ Beryl Markham

All the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it. ~ Beryl Markham

The future life is where we will go on helping to bring the universe to perfection, which is God's grand ultimate aim. [The purpose of life] is to help God run the universe. Everyone in that better land will be busy all the time, and the environment will be perfect all the time for doing the work which God assigns to all. ~ Edwin Markham

Wine's terrible for babies." Dorian swept into the sitting room to join me, elegantly arranging himself on a love seat that displayed his purple velvet robes to best effect.
"Well of course it is. I'd never dream of giving wine to an infant! What do you take me for, a barbarian? But for you ... well, it might go a long way to make you a little less jumpy. You've been positively unbearable to live around.
"I can't have it either. It affects the babies in utero. ~ Richelle Mead

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

Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it. ~ Beryl Markham

We fly, but we have not 'conquered' the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick fall across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance. ~ Beryl Markham

Markham even had our banners ready. The polite NON AD CAPITAGIUM (No to the poll tax), the hopeful MAGIS STIPENDIUM HISTORICI (More money for historians) and the always accurate POLICITI NOSTRAE OMNEC WANKERS SUNT (Most politicians are not very good). ~ Jodi Taylor

They drew a line that shut me out,
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout!
But love and I had the wit to win
We drew a circle and brought them in. ~ Edwin Markham

But my father goes on.And I've noticed other things,too.I think you're in love with Ky Markham.I think you want to find him,wherever he's gone. ~ Ally Condie

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

From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic. ~ Beryl Markham

Show me you care about our common tongue. Bring to your [writing] passion, deeply informed by knowledge of your subject. Stay me, not with apples and flagons, but with wit and grace, humor and intense caring about your discipline. Don't slack, don't give it a lick and a promise, don't make it evident that you posted what was 'good enough for government work,' don't try and fake it. Give it your best, your all, not for pence, but for the love of the craft.
Do these things, as these writers and scores I have not named do, bring to your work your self, your heart, your voice, motherly or youthful, lawyerly or priestly, conservative or liberal, it matters not. Do this and I and hundreds of others will return again and again to your work, not merely because we may have a burning need for a new printer or an abiding interest in college newspapers or what have you, but because we wish to spend time with your mind and voice. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

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. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa ... Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.
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. ~ Beryl Markham

How is it possible to bring order out of memory? ~ Beryl Markham

No matter where you go in East Texas, 'Deep' East Texas is always about twenty miles further in than wherever you are. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

I had never realized before how quickly men deteriorate without razors and clean shirts. They are like potted plants that go to weed unless they are pruned and tended daily. A single day's growth beard makes a man look careless; two days', derelict; and four days', polluted. Blix and Weston hadn't shaved for three. ~ Beryl Markham

As it happens, however, no one in my family recognizes the existence of an impossibility. (We're not specially courageous, we're just bullheaded as all get-out, and the whole lot of us as independent as a hog on ice. Every last one of us would argue with a wooden cigar-store Indian.) ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic. ~ Beryl Markham

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

And last," Ms. Baginski carried on. "My most precious possession, the thing I treasure above anything else in this world, that being my granddaughter, Josephine Diana Malone, I hereby bequeath to James Markham Spear. ~ Kristen Ashley

Public life in this country is too damn dominated by people who'd read more if only their lips didn't get so tired. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

But that's the thing about East Texas. Red dirt never quite washes out, and pine pollen is tenacious as original sin. You can leave East Texas, for Houston, for the Metroplex, for the Commonwealth, for New York, or Bonn or Tokyo or Kowloon; but you can never quite leave it behind. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

Atop their gleaming backs the jockeys look like gaudy baubles, secured with strings. They bob up and down, they rise, lean forward, then settle again. ~ Beryl Markham

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

In the family of continents, Africa is the silent, the brooding sister, courted for centuries by knight-errant empires - rejecting them one by one and severally, because she is too sage and a little bored with the importunity of it all. ~ Beryl Markham

There is respect for a heart like yours, and if its beating stop, the spirit lives to guard the ways you wandered. ~ Beryl Markham

Sorrows come to stretch out places in the heart for joy. ~ Edwin Markham

Three were the fates. Poverty that chains; gray drudgery that grinds the hope away, and gaping ignorance that starves the soul. ~ Edwin Markham

There is a destiny which makes us brothers; none goes his way alone. All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own. ~ Edwin Markham

The mechanistic age impended over an horizon not hostile, but silently indifferent. ~ Beryl Markham

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

Only the soul that knows the mighty grief can know the mighty rapture. Sorrows come to stretch out spaces in the heart for joy. ~ Edwin Markham

There is no true liberty for the individual except as he finds it in the liberty of all. There is no true security for the individual except as he finds it in the security for all. ~ Edwin Markham

We laughed at some things because we had grown so much older; we were serious about others because we were still so young. ~ Beryl Markham

In keeping with the Laws of the Prophet Bubba and the Code of the UIL, as set forth in the Book of First Downs, as the sun sets on Friday nights the rites of the Texas state religion are celebrated: high school, smash-mouth football. 'And lo, the children of Jim Bob do take to the roads in caravans and they do go up unto the stadium by tribes, the Indians of Groveton, the Panthers of Lufkin, the Mustangs of Overton, and the very Wildcats of Palestine, and who shall withstand the traffic jams thereof?' Thus is it written, and so it is and shall be. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

Smooth, but not a criminal. ~ Markham J. Geller

Cassia.
I know which life is my real one now, no matter what happens. It's the one with you. For some reason, knowing that even one person knows my story makes things different. Maybe it's like the poem says. Maybe this is my way of not going gentle.
I love you. (Ky Markham) ~ Ally Condie

I want to tell him that deep down each time Hannah looked at him she was grateful it was him because Jude did something that the others didn't. He came back for her. ~ Melina Marchetta

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

We are all blind until we see That in the human plan Nothing is worth the making If it does not make the man. Why build these cities glorious If man unbuilded goes? We build the world in vain Unless the builders also grow. ~ Edwin Markham

At the heart of the cyclone
tearing the sky
And flinging the clouds
and the towers by
Is a place of central calm;
So here in the roar of mortal things,
I have a place where my spirit sings,
In the hollow of God's palm. ~ Edwin Markham

A fine job of work and a fine colt. Shall I reward you or Coquette - or both? ~ Beryl Markham

I learned the tyranny of figures before I knew the value of a pound. ~ Beryl Markham

In 1912, although he, more even than other members of the Senate and the House, thought himself presidential timber (a delusion from which vanishingly few senators and representatives are wholly free when they gaze enraptured into their mirrors of a morning), Senator [William Alden] Smith wasn't noted for much of anything. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

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

None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones
not even the lion.
He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment.
The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him without killing him, and then turned the unsconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime. ~ Beryl Markham

Oft when the white, still dawn lifted the skies and pushed the hills apart, I have felt it like a glory in my heart. ~ Edwin Markham

It is amazing what a lot of insect life goes on under your nose when you have got it an inch from the earth. I suppose it goes on in any case, but if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science. ~ Beryl Markham

There is the world of difference between failing at something and being a failure - but many people do not differentiate. ~ Ursula Markham

The hours that made them were good, and so were the moments that made the hours. I have had responsibilities and work, dangers and pleasure, good friends, and a world without walls to live in. These things I still have, I remind myself - and shall have until I leave them. ~ Beryl Markham

If T. S. Eliot had stayed in St Louis, he would never have held that April was the cruelest month. Well, unless he was a Browns fan.

At this moment, in the ragged middle of February, it begins: beneath the snow, roots quicken. In the Deep South, already trees begin to bud. And all over the land – indeed, all over the world, in Japan, in the Caribbean, in Australia – a certain class of mammal, fubsy, amiable, sweet-natured, begins to twitch and wake from hibernation: the baseball fan. Is it the lengthening of the days? Is it some subtle signal that causes them to begin to emerge from a stupor only lightly disturbed by meetings of the Hot Stove League? Naw. It is the magic phrase, 'pitchers and catchers to report…. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

I (God) will leave man to make the fateful guess, Will leave him torn between the no and yes, Leave him unresting till he rests in me, Drawn upward by the choice that makes him free, Leave him in tragic loneliness to choose, With all in life to win or all to lose. ~ Edwin Markham

That's what makes death so hard
unsatisfied curiosity ~ Beryl Markham

When one day fate visits us again, Jessa comes running into Hannah's house to tell us the news that they've caught the serial killer. Her tone is hushed and I try hard not to look at Jude, who is working on the skirting boards. But I can feel the humour in his gaze as it falls on me and I know that I will never live down the fact that I suspected him.
When I ask her, "Who?" slightly curious, she's already out the door looking for Hannah and Tate. "No one important!" she shouts from the other room. "Just some postman in Yass." I look at Jude's face and I see it whiten and we vow never ever to tell the others. ~ Melina Marchetta

The crest and crowning of all good, Life's final star, is brotherhood. ~ Edwin Markham

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

To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told
that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks. ~ Beryl Markham

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

Regarding 'Jabez's Prayer', I will say at once that I am a very poor Christian, and indeed a bad man. My besetting sins are many, and the least of them are the fleshlier ones: the really deadly ones are pride and intellectual arrogance. But I can honestly say I have never sunk to confusing prayer: the soul's colloquy with the Creator, mortal man's dialogue with the Deity: with magical incantation and the ritual of the 'spell. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

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

I fear the vermin that shall undermineSenate and citadel and school and shrine. ~ Edwin Markham

Still, not to be English is hardly regarded as a fatal deficiency even by the English, though grave enough to warrant sympathy. ~ Beryl Markham

No soul can be forever banned, Eternally bereft, Whoever falls from God's right hand Is caught into his left. ~ Edwin Markham

If I'm talking to patients who can't answer, why not talk to the port, too? (Xander Markham) ~ Ally Condie

On that bright May morning, with the lilacs budding and the kids off to school, Tom Markham approached his wife with the best of intentions. ~ Barbara Delinsky

It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation's hour had left it. ~ Beryl Markham

In vain we build the city if we do not first build the man. ~ Edwin Markham

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. ~ Beryl Markham

The two of us hold each other's gazes for a long, unembarrassed moment and I feel that Ky knows. I'm not sure what he knows - whether he knows me, or just something about me. ~ Ally Condie

Using 4-feet x 8-feet beds, that would be 22 beds per person or 66 for a family of three. ~ Brett L. Markham

(On vultures
... those false but democratic mourners at every casual bier ... ~ Beryl Markham

[I]t is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday. ~ Beryl Markham

Mr Markham, the box marked "Sex" is not an invitation. Please amend the details and apologise to Mrs Partridge. ~ Jodi Taylor

The way the two of them look at each other is like touching. ~ Ally Condie

(This town) doesn't look like anything; it isn't anything. Its five tin-roofed huts cling to the skinny tracks of the Uganda Railway like parasites on a vine. ~ Beryl Markham

No, you love to confuse me and drive me crazy. You don't really love me. You don't know what love is."
"Yeah, I think I do." His brows lowered, and he took a step toward her. "I have loved you my whole life, Delaney. I can't remember a day when I didn't love you. I loved you the day I practically knocked you out with a snowball. I loved you when I flattened the tires on your bike so I could walk you home. I loved you when I saw you hiding behind the sunglasses at the Value Rite, and I loved you when you loved that loser son of a bitch Tommy Markham. I never forgot the smell of your hair or the texture of your skin the night I laid you on the hood of my car at Angel Beach. So don't tell me I don't love you. Don't tell me
" His voice shook and he pointed a finger at her. "Just don't tell me that. ~ Rachel Gibson

Markham," I tell him. "Ky Markham." Because that's the name she knows me by. That's my real name now. ~ Ally Condie

Bah, he still saw the same stupidity. The image of the hanged man in the farming community of Yondern flashed through his mind. Now there was a war brewing between the Steelwielders and some foreign religion. More mindless loss over beliefs and mythology. But.. he could not deny the noble features in his companions. Although Perfidian was too blithe and Elaina too didactic, they had risked their life to do what was right. He did owe them his life. He could not deny the nobility he saw in many different people, bits and pieces of nobility that shined through under pressure. The guards who risked their lives to protect the villagers, Markham who flew at the dangerous dwarf, swords flashing; even an Eruthian merchant who stopped in his journey to share tales with complete strangers'. ~ T.P. Grish

It is better to rust out than wear out. ~ Edwin Markham

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

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

In the past few years, genetics have confirmed that the hunter-gatherers were not overwhelmed by the new wave of sedentary farmers, and that the first agricultural revolution spread well in advance of its first users, by contact and trade in ideas. Nice to see science catching up with economics and military history. Any economist could tell you technology spreads beyond its first adopters, even if they stay at home. And any military historian could tell you that, in a contest between people who hunt and kill aurochs and farmers armed with hoes, the smart money is on the hunters. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

Southern culture is vivified, made a culture, by the melding of influences that are held far more closely than in other, lesser parts of the country: in the Southland, the past is not really past, and the ancestral homelands are not so far away as they are elsewhere, paradoxically: the assimilation of Southerners, unlike the uneasy attempts at assimilation of Americans elsewhere, has created a culture in which the old influences in our blood, of the Ivory Coast, Languedoc, the Highlands, Wales, Antrim, and Devon, of Sephardic communities from Amsterdam to Cadiz, of the Caribbean sugar islands and Castile, have been absorbed into the fabric of New World life. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

A domesticated lion is only an unnatural lion - and whatever is unnatural is untrustworthy. ~ Beryl Markham

The reason all the 'intellectuals' – Sartre and Marx, Hemingway and Hellman – (. . .) are Leftists is that a defining characteristic of the 'intellectual' is the belief, stemming from inane notions of the perfectibility of man, that he can sit in a darkened room and purely by thinking, create a new heaven and a new earth, utopia, the eschaton immanentized. Rubbish, of course, but there you have it. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

This dress makes me look fat," I told Jasmine as we stood near the back of the crowd and watched the last minute preperations fall into place.
She glanced over at me and my efforts to rearrange the folds of my long, gauzy dress.
"Your pregnant," she stated. "Everything's supposed to make you look fat."
I Scowled. "I think the correct reponse was 'No it doesn't. ~ Richelle Mead

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

…it was even more disconcerting to examine your charts before a proposed flight only to find that in many cases the bulk of the terrain over which you had to fly was bluntly marked: 'UNSURVEYED.' It was as if the mapmakers had said, 'We are aware that between this spot and that one, there are several hundred thousands of acres, but until you make a forced landing there, we won't know whether it is mud, desert, or jungle – and the chances are we won't know then! ~ 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

To throw oneself to the side of the oppressed is the only dignified thing to do in life. ~ Edwin Markham

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life. ~ Edwin Markham