Grew up in the Kenyan coffee fields. Was bitten by a lion when she was 10. Professional horse trainer turned pilot. Kenya's first female aviatrix and first person to attempt to circumnavigate the earth from east to west. Numerous scandalous affairs with the Happy Valley clan. Crashed a plane in Austrailia and survived. West with the Night is one of my favorite books. Her words are like poetry and her life is like a dream. Beryl Markham is my hero.
"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 (West with the Night)
"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 (West with the Night)
"Elephant, beyond the fact that their size and conformation are aesthetically more suited to the treading of this earth than our angular informity, have an average intelligence comparable to our own. Of course they are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves -- nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin's lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it. This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets -- and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other."
- Beryl Markham
