"There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. 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."
— Beryl Markham (West with the Night)

"Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die."
— Beryl Markham (West with the Night)

"I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are burried deep--leave it anyway except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can."
— Beryl Markham (West with the Night)

"But, for a little while, this is the place for us -- a good place too--a place of good omen, a place of beginning things--and of ending things I never thought would end."
— Beryl Markham (West with the Night)

"I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny"
— Beryl Markham (West with the Night)

"The mechanistic age impended over an horizon not hostile, but silently indifferent."
— Beryl Markham (West with the Night)

"'there's an old adage' he said, 'translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages -- "Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die."'"
— Beryl Markham (West with the Night)

"We fly, but we have not 'conquered' the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick fall across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled by our ignorance."
— Beryl Markham (West with the Night)