Quotes from Helen Macdonald

Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.

When we meet animals for the first time, we expect them to conform to the stories we've heard about them. But there is always, always a gap. The boar was still a surprise. Animals are.

Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference. The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.

children treasure the hope that they might be like the children in books: secretly magical, part of some deeper, mysterious world that makes them something out of the ordinary.

I can't, even now, arrange it in the right order. The memories are like heavy blocks of glass. I can put them down in different places but they don't make a story.

I learned that to harden your heart was not the same as not caring.

Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.

comfort in the blithe superiority that is the refuge of the small.

When I saw Jurassic Park in the cinema something unexpected happened when the first dinosaur came on screen: I felt a huge, hopeful pressure in my chest and my eyes filled with tears. It was miraculous: a thing I'd seen representations of since I was a child had come alive.

I know how to do this, I thought. I am good, at least, at this. I know all the steps to this dance

There is a kind of coldness that allows interrogators to put cloth over the mouths of men and pour water into their lungs, and lets them believe this is not torture. What you do to your heart. You stand apart from yourself, as if your souls could be a migrant beast too, standing some way away from the horror, and looking fixedly at the sky.

Later (swifts) gather higher in the sky...And then, all at once, as if summoned by a call or a bell, they rise higher and higher until they disappear from view. These ascents are called vesper flights....Vespers are evening devotional prayers, the last and the most solemn of the day, and I have always thought 'vesper flights' the most beautiful phrase, an ever-falling blue.

I've used tarot too. Not often. But sufficient to know how little use the cards are in divining the future and to see how unerringly the cards reflect my deepest states of being, emotions I'd not let myself feel at the time.

At times of difficulty, watching birds ushers you into a different world, where no words need to be spoken.

I know now that I'm not trusting anyone or anything any more. And that it is hard to live for long periods without trusting anyone or anything. It's like living without sleep; eventually it will kill you.

Vast flocks of fieldfares netted the sky, turning it to something strangely like a sixteenth-century sleeve sewn with pearls.

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.

The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away. There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge. My flight from death was on her barred and beating wings. But I had forgotten that the puzzle that was death was caught up in the hawk, and I was caught up in it too.

Here's a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It's from the Old English bereafian, meaning 'to deprive of, take away, seize, rob'.

Someone once told me that every writer has a subject that underlies everything they write. It can be love or death, betrayal or belonging, home or hope or exile. I choose to think that my subject is love, and most specifically love for the glittering world of non-human life around us.

Sometimes, a few times, I felt my father must be sitting near me as I sat on a train or in a café. This was comforting. It all was. Because these were the normal madnesses of grief.

Because this story struck me as extraordinary, and it still does. Once upon a time there was a man in a spacesuit in a secret reconnaissance plane reading The Once and Future King, that great historical epic, that comic, tragic, romantic retelling of the Arthurian legend that tussles with questions of war and aggression, and might, and right, and the matter of what a nation is or might be.

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, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There's little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss?