88 Quotes by Beryl Markham

Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility. When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of it’s coming is lost. You fly forever, weary with an invariable scene, and when you are at last released from its monotony, you remember nothing of it because there was nothing there.

It is really this that makes death so hard – curiosity unsatisfied.

Names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart.

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.

It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick falls across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance.

Before such a flight it was the anticipation of aloneness more than any thought of physical danger that used to haunt me a little and make me wonder sometimes if mine was the the most wonderful job in the world after all. I always concluded that lonely or not it was still free from the curse of boredom.

Each humid, tropic day is stillborn, and does not breathe, however lustily pregnant the night that gave it birth.