Quotes from Helen Macdonald

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, [...]

We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.

Here's a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It's from the Old English bereafian, meaning 'to deprive of, take away, seize, rob'. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.

You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

When you are broken, you run. But you don't always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards.

In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: 'Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.' He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.

When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe any more. Being an expert opens you up to judgement.

It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.

The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.

Like a good academic, I thought books were for answers.

I wish that we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are. I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness.

Hands are for other human hands to hold.

It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.

What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later... what the mind does after losing one's father isn't just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.

The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.

the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Once, twice. Perhaps never again.

The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane.

Some things happen only once, twice in a lifetime. The world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might be alive to see them.

Promises that are broken, again and again, through fear, through loss of nerve, through any number of things that hide that deep desire, at heart, to obliterate one's broken self.

Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human.

What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has done.

We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.

Stimulus: opera. Response: kill.