Below are the highlights from the following selection of my 2014 Reading List: (additionally, I wrote more about the incomparable writing of Markham here--she's easily one of the top 5 writers of the 20th century).
West with the Night by Beryl Markham
You have 25 highlighted passages
Last annotated on January 31, 2013
apologized with a bow from the waist and said he had thought it was spinach.
Read more at location 505
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.
Read more at location 603
‘Lions are more intelligent than some men,’ he said, ‘and more courageous than most. A lion will fight for what he has and for what he needs; he is contemptuous of cowards and wary of his equals. But he is not afraid. You can always trust a lion to be exactly what he is — and never anything else.’
Read more at location 705
whatever is unnatural is untrustworthy.’
Read more at location 722
was an immense roar that encompassed the world and dissolved me into
Read more at location 760
He bought the land because it was cheap and fertile, and because East Africa was new and you could feel the future of it under your feet.
Read more at location 812
reasonably innocent in the matter of a signed contract.
Read more at location 1621
never hope more than you work.’ A Spartan thread held through
Read more at location 1637
Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it. I sit in a labyrinth of solitude jabbing at its bulwarks with the point of a pen — jabbing, jabbing.
Read more at location 1764
I had always believed that the important, the exciting changes in one’s life took place at some crossroad of the world where people met and built high buildings and traded the things they made and laughed and laboured and clung to their whirling civilization like beads on the skirts of a dervish. Everybody was breathless in the world I imagined; everybody moved to hurried music that I never expected to hear. I never yearned for it much. It had a literary and unattainable quality like my childhood remembrance of Scheherazade’s Baghdad.
Read more at location 1822
In Africa people learn to serve each other. They live on credit balances of little favours that they give and may, one day, ask to have returned. In any country almost empty of men, ‘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.
Read more at location 1832
‘When you fly,’ the young man said, ‘you get a feeling of possession that you couldn’t have if you owned all of Africa. You feel that everything you see belongs to you — all the pieces are put together, and the whole is yours; not that you want it, but because, when you’re alone in a plane, there’s no one to share it. It’s there and it’s yours. It makes you feel bigger than you are — closer
Read more at location 1857
closer to being something you’ve sensed you might be capable of, but never had the courage to seriously imagine.’
Read more at location 1860
formless. When the low stars shone
Read more at location 2885
But memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will, and my father knows it.
Read more at location 2982
had slipped into the cabin a moment before. I have it still — a travelling clock bound in imitation leather,
Read more at location 3041
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.
Read more at location 3351
Today Africa may seem to be that ever-promised land, almost achieved; but tomorrow it may be a dark land again, drawn into itself, contemptuous, and impatient with the futility of eager men who have scrambled over it since the experiment of Eden. 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.
Read more at location 3354
Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice. Barbarism, however bright its trappings, is still alien to her heart.
Read more at location 3362
‘We’ll be back,’ said Blix. And of course we would be, but, as we flew out over the Mediterranean toward the island of Sardinia with the coast of Tunisia still under our wings, there was no sign that Africa was aware that we were leaving, or cared.
Read more at location 3363
Seeing it again could not be living it again. You can always rediscover an old path and wander over it, but the best you can do then is to say, ‘Ah, yes, I know this turning!’ — or remind yourself that, while you remember that unforgettable valley, the valley no longer remembers you.
Read more at location 3412
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.
Read more at location 3498
Flight is but momentary escape from the eternal custody of earth.
Read more at location 3520
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