Home > Work > West with the Night

West with the Night QUOTES

West with the Night QUOTES

41 " 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 , West with the Night

42 " I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

43 " I could never tell where inspiration begins and impulse leaves off. I suppose the answer is in the outcome. If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse. "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

44 " 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. "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

45 " (This place) presumed to be a town then, but was hardly more than a word under a tin roof. "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

46 " work and hope. But never hope more than you work. "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

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

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

48 " 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. "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

49 " It is really this that makes death so hard — curiosity unsatisfied. "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

50 " 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. "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

51 " The mechanistic age impended over an horizon not hostile, but silently indifferent. "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

52 " But memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will... "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

53 " ...our hostess backed out of the room, grinning vapidly. She had long since forgotten the meaning of a smile, but the physical ability to make the gesture remained. I felt that the grin...would shatter if it were touched and fall to the floor in pieces. "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

54 " 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 , West with the Night

55 " How is it possible to bring order out of memory? "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

56 " 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 , West with the Night

57 " love thy neighbour’ is less a pious injunction than a rule for survival. If you meet one in trouble, you stop — another time he may stop for you. "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

58 " (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 , West with the Night

59 " To her all things are poignantly lacking — but she is incapable of desiring anything. "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night

60 " I knew too little of Africa to leave it, and what I knew I loved too much. "

― Beryl Markham , West with the Night