Quotes from Kathleen Jamie

There was a time—until very recently in the scheme of things—when there were no wild animals, because every animal was wild; and humans were few. Animals, and animal presence over us and around us. Over every horizon, animals. Their skins clothing our skins, their fats in our lamps, their bladders to carry water, meat when we could get it.

We couldn't see the real dark for the metaphorical dark. Because of the metaphorical dark, the death-dark, we were constantly concerned to banish the natural dark.

Isn't that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?

We know we are a species obsessed with itself and its own past and origins. We know we are capable of removing from the sanctuary of the earth shards and fragments, and gently placing them in museums. Great museums in great cities—the hallmarks of civilisation.

Every year, in the third week of February, there is a day, or more usually a run of days, when one can say for sure that the light is back. Some juncture has been reached and the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky...

When we were young, we were told that poetry is about voice, about finding a voice and speaking with this voice, but the older I get I think it's not about voice, it's about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don't just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers I like best are those who attend.

You are placed in landscape, you are placed in time. But, within that, there's a bit of room for manoeuvre. To some extent, you can be author of your own fate.

Pity the dark: we're so concerned to overcome and banish it, it's crammed full of all that's devilish, like some grim cupboard under the stair. But dark is good. We are conceived and carried in darkness, are we not?

When I want to know a thing, I resort to books and feel strangely exposed without books to fall back on, as though standing on a ledge.

Maybe there's something instinctive in us, that we're drawn to human habitation and can't resist a ruin, the way newborn babies respond to a crude drawing of a face. These are the rarities in human history, the places from which we've retreated. These once-inhabited places play a different air to the uninhabited; they suggest the lost past, the lost Eden, not the Utopia to come.

In September countless sand and house-martins jazz above the river, taking insects from the surface, from the air, thousands of birds kissing the river farewell. They creak, a sound like the air rubbing against itself. Summer is everything they know; they're preparing themselves, sensing in the shortening days a door they must dash through before it shuts.

No Orkney weather lasts long, and you can see new weather coming a long way off. There are frequent scraps of rainbow. And birds. At any point you can stop walking, or pull over and lower the car window and hear the cries of peewits and tremulous curlews.

We look about the world, by the light we have made, and realise it's all vulnerable, and all worth saving, and no one can do it but us.

Fancy – day after day of summer sunshine, in April. The house grows dusty and neglected because we spend so much time outdoors.

a short seven miles away is the Neolithic village called Skara Brae. There is preserved a huddle of roofless huts, dug half underground into midden and sand dune. There, you can marvel at the domestic normality, that late Stone Age people had beds and cupboards and neighbours and beads. You can feel both their presence, their day-to-day lives, and their utter absence. It's a good place to go. It re-calibrates your sense of time.

late the other night, when the kids were asleep and the birds at roost, I made a tour through the Internet's second-hand bookstores,…

I grew to appreciate the company of people who listen to the world. They don't feel the need to talk all the while. They were alert to bird-cries, waves sucking on rocks, a rope frittering against a mast.

on a Corncrake call…] Fairy music is said to do this; to lead a man on in his confusion and drunkenness, to start, then stop, then begin again from another place, ever luring him on. This was not a beautiful music, it has to be said; hardly the art of fairies. Mind you, it could be a goblin carpenter, sawing away at his little workbench, if you'd had a few too many at the island disco and were of a fanciful mind.

Knowing birds is like being fluent in a foreign language, or adept with a musical instrument.

It's poetry's job, isn't it, to keep making sense of the world in language, to keep the negotiation going? We can't relinquish that.

I can't do it!' I wailed, half in jest. 'You are doing it.' he replied.

I stopped in the tiny garden that encloses the Tolsta war memorial. The bronze plaque lists too many names for this small place; the same surnames recur over and again. The memorial, in the shape of an open book, also remembers the many soldiers who were returning to Lewis from the Great War, only to be drowned when their ship, the Iolaire, struck rocks outside Stornoway Harbour, which is a difficult one to make sense of.

Remember the end of the road is also its beginning.

You are placed in landscape, you are placed in time. But, within that, there's a bit of room for manoeuvre. To some extent, you can be author of your own fate. At least, that's what I'd been lucky enough to learn. THE GANNETRY the whole pageantry of the year was awake tingling near the edge of the sea —W.