Beryl Markham Quotes About Animals

Quotes about: Animals

• To an eagle or to an owl or to a rabbit, man must seem a masterful and yet a forlorn animal; he has but two friends. In his almost universal unpopularity he points out, with pride, that these two are the dog and the horse. He believes, with an innocence peculiar to himself, that they are equally proud of this alleged confraternity. He says, 'Look at my two noble friends -- they are dumb, but they are loyal.' I have for years suspected that they are only tolerant.

  Beryl Markham

  Dog, Horse, Believe

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.122, Open Road Media

• It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.

  Beryl Markham

  Animal, Men, Elephants

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.227, Open Road Media

• To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told -- that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.

  Beryl Markham

  Nature, Animal, Mountain

  Beryl Markham (1994). “The Illustrated West with the Night”, Stewart, Tabori, & Chang

• 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.

  Beryl Markham

  Dog, Loneliness, Book

  Beryl Markham (2015). “West With The Night”, p.182, Hachette UK

• I know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains - the drab and dowdy digger in the earth. He is the uncomely but intrepid defender of family, home, and bourgeois convention, and he will fight anything of any size that intrudes upon his smug existence. ... His eyes are small and lightless and capable of but one expression - suspicion. What he does not understand, he suspects, and what he suspects, he fights.

  Beryl Markham

  Eye, Home, Fighting

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.102, Open Road Media

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