{"author":"Beryl Markham","author_id":"Beryl+Markham","total_quotes":31,"quotes":[{"text":"To venture ... Close (to a lion) on foot ... Would mean the sudden shattering of any kindly belief that the similarity of the lion and the pussy cat goes much beyond their whiskers. But then, since men still live by the sword, it's a little optimistic to expect the lion to withdraw his claws, handicapped as he is by his inability to read our better effusions about the immorality of bloodshed.","author":"Beryl Markham","tags":["cats","danger","killing","lions"],"id":10894,"author_id":"Beryl+Markham"},{"text":"You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself.","author":"Beryl Markham","tags":["self-awareness"],"id":21768,"author_id":"Beryl+Markham"},{"text":"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.","author":"Beryl Markham","tags":["adventure","boredom","england","ennui","london","urban-life","urbanism"],"id":44235,"author_id":"Beryl+Markham"},{"text":"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.","author":"Beryl Markham","tags":["aspiration","dreams","flying","horizon"],"id":53960,"author_id":"Beryl+Markham"},{"text":"The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.","author":"Beryl Markham","tags":["discovery","needle-in-haystack","organization","search"],"id":80998,"author_id":"Beryl+Markham"},{"text":"In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.","author":"Beryl Markham","tags":["parents"],"id":84118,"author_id":"Beryl+Markham"},{"text":"The Old Days, the Lost Days -- in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened to those certain songs.","author":"Beryl Markham","tags":["imagination","memories","past","reminiscence"],"id":96743,"author_id":"Beryl+Markham"},{"text":"You can live a lifetime and  at the end of it  know more about other people than you know about yourself.","author":"Beryl Markham","tags":["self","knowledge"],"id":104717,"author_id":"Beryl+Markham"},{"text":"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.","author":"Beryl Markham","tags":["africa","colonial-society","discrimination","inequality"],"id":113886,"author_id":"Beryl+Markham"},{"text":"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.","author":"Beryl Markham","tags":["identity"],"id":144877,"author_id":"Beryl+Markham"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":31,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}