# Quote — Beryl Markham, West With The Night

> Always the weed returns; the cultured plant retreats before it. Racial purity, true aristocracy, devolve not from edict, nor from rote, but from the preservation of kinship with the elemental forces and purposes of life whose understanding is not further beyond the mind of a Native shepherd than beyond the cultured fumblings of a mortar-board intelligence.

- Author: [Beryl Markham](https://www.leafyquotes.com/beryl-markham.md)
- Book: [West With The Night](https://www.leafyquotes.com/beryl-markham/west-with-the-night.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Beryl_Markham#West_with_the_Night_(1942)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/beryl-markham/west-with-the-night/always-the-weed

## More from this book

> Moreover, it seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of town, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hole, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit.

p. 32 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/beryl-markham/west-with-the-night/moreover-it-seemed.md)

> So far as I know I was the only professional woman pilot in Africa at that time period I had no freelance competition in Kenya, man or woman.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/beryl-markham/west-with-the-night/so-far-as-i-know.md)

> Why I ran at all or with what purpose in mind is beyond my answering, but when I had no specific destination I always ran as fast as I could in the hope of finding one--and I always found one.

p. 57 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/beryl-markham/west-with-the-night/why-i-ran.md)