Quotes from Helen Macdonald

I read that after denial comes grief. Or anger. Or guilt.

I wanted to cut loose from the world, and I shared, too, his desire to escape to the wild, a desire that can rip away all human softness and leave you stranded in a world of savage, courteous despair.

That was the great puzzle, and it was played out again and again. How hearts do stop.

What we see in the lives of animals are lessons we've learned from the world.

You don't know anything about them, but you feel the other person's there, one friend told me. It's like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow. History

The property belonged to our boss and his wife. A pebble-dashed box streaked with green algae, it had a pine paneled kitchen and a low ceiling sitting room with a Rayburn, a brown vinyl sofa, and eye-bending 1970s carpets that did bad things to you when you were drunk.

These alarm calls remind me that we have consequential presence, that the animals we like to watch are creatures with their own needs, desires, emotions, lives.

The tiny, hair-like feathers between her beak and eye – crines – are for catching blood so that it will dry, and flake, and fall away, and the frowning eyebrows that lend her face its hollow rapacious intensity are bony projections to protect her eyes when crashing into undergrowth after prey.

That was the moment. Until a minute ago I was so terrifying I was all that existed. But then she had forgotten me. Only for a fraction of a second, but it was enough. The forgetting was delightful because it was a sign that the hawk was starting to accept me. But there was a deeper, darker thrill. It was that I had been forgotten.

If you want to see something very much, you just have to be patient and wait. There was no patience in my waiting, but time had passed all the same, and worked its careful magic.

I saw those nineteenth-century falconers were projecting onto their hawks all the male qualities they thought threatened by modern life: wildness, power, virility, independence and strength.

I saw those nineteenth-century falconers were projecting onto their hawks all the male qualities they thought threatened by modern life: wildness, power, virility, independence and strength. By identifying with their hawks as they trained them, they could introject, or repossess, those qualities. At the same time they could exercise their power by 'civilising' a wild and primitive creature. Masculinity and conquest: two imperial myths for the price of one.

That is the lure: that is why we lose ourselves, when powerless from hurt and grief, in drugs or gambling or drink; in addictions that collar the broken soul and shake it like a dog. I had found my addiction on that day out with Mabel. It was as ruinous, in a way, as if I'd taken a needle and shot myself with heroin. I had taken flight to a place from which I didn't want to ever return.

To gain approval, to avoid trouble, he had to mirror what was around him: it was how he had tried to win love from his mother as a child. It was a life of perpetual disguise.

My walks with the hawk were stressful, requiring endless vigilance, and they were wearing me away. As the hawk became tamer I was growing wilder. Fear was contagious: it rose unbidden in my heart as people approached us. I was no longer certain if the hawk bated because she was frightened of what she saw, or if the terror she felt was mine.

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

I feel ashamed of my nation's reticence. Its desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn't entirely normal.

happiness. An obscure shame grips me. I had a fixed idea of what a goshawk was, just as those Victorian falconers had, and it was not big enough to hold what goshawks are. No one had ever told me goshawks played. It was not in the books. I had not imagined it was possible. I wondered if it was because no one had ever played with them. The thought made me terribly sad.

You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to 'tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment'.

It must have been like death,'3 he wrote, 'the thing which we can never know beforehand.

While still a schoolmaster he bought two Siamese cats – a breed renowned for its independence – and tried to 'train them to place no reliance or affection upon anybody but themselves'. It was what he had been trying to do himself for years. 'In vain,' he concluded, with disgust. 'Far from wandering free and independent . . . they sleep all day in the sitting room, in the intervals of mewing at me for more food.

White had learned that going back in time was a way of fixing things; uncovering past traumas, revisiting them and defusing their power.

White called Prisonface to life in order that he should suffer, be punished, mocked, reduced to rags and die.

You are a man whose eyes are bright with unspilled tears when you tell me of the horror of your journey here.