Quotes from Helen Macdonald

Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don't get to say when or how.

I was holding a small clump of reindeer moss in one hand, a little piece of that branching, pale green-grey lichen that can survive just about anything the world throws at it. It is patience made manifest. Keep reindeer moss in the dark, freeze it, dry it to a crisp, it won't die. It goes dormant and waits for things to improve. Impressive stuff.

Maine has given me a family for Christmas and shown me a hawk can be part of it too. It's shown me that you can reconcile the wild. You can bring it home with you.

Science encourages us to reflect upon the size of our lives in relation to the vastness of the universe or the bewildering multitudes of microbes that exist inside our bodies. And it reveals to us a planet that is beautifully and insistently not human.

She breathes hot hawk breath in my face.

Knots were probably the earliest spells.

For weeks, in secret heresy, I whispered Dear Horus instead of Our Father when we recited the Lord's Prayer at school assemblies. It was a suitably formal address, I thought, having learned it from writing birthday thank-you notes.

Elusive, spectacular, utterly at home, the fact of these British goshawks makes me happy. Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands. The wild can be human work.

Perhaps I blinked. Perhaps it was as simple as that. And in that tiny black gap which the brain disguises they'd dived into the wood.

I knew I wasn't mad mad because I'd seen people in the grip of psychosis before, and that was madness as obvious as the taste of blood in the mouth. The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane.