Quotes from Helen Macdonald

I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing – not just from the wild, but from people's everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of.

I stalked around the edge of the wood, crouching low, holding my breath. My attention was microscopically fierce. I'd become a thing of eyes and will alone. Mabel held her wings out from her sides, her head snaking, reptilian, eyes glowing. It felt like I was holding the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle.

And I found there were myriad definitions of this thing called tragedy that had wormed its way through the history of literature; and the simplest of all was this: that it is the story of a figure who, through some moral flaw or personal failing, falls through force of circumstance to his doom.

ran into my old room, sat on the little bed and hugged my knees, pain worming around inside my chest like a thing with a million tiny teeth and claws.

a torn-paper whiteness behind the sun that speaks of frost to come.

so that new things I encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past.

And when I look again she seems neither bird nor reptile, but a creature shaped by a million years of evolution for a life she's not yet lived.

History and hawks and hoods and the implications of taking something's sight away to calm it.

On the way home I felt a great and simple sadness. I missed my dad. I missed him very much.

I look. There it is. I feel it. The insistent pull to the heart that the hawk brings, that very old longing of mine to possess the hawk's eye. To live the safe and solitary life; to look down on the world from a height and keep it there. To be the watcher; invulnerable, detached, complete. My eyes fill with water. Here I am, I think. And I do not think I am safe.

For even if we don't believe in miracles, they are there, and they are waiting for us to find them.

Wild things are made from human histories.

There are actions we can take that seem impossible and pointless and yet they are entirely, and precisely, and absolutely required. We can exert pressure, we can speak up, we can march and cry and mourn and sing and hope and fight for the world, standing with others, even if we don't believe it. Even if change seems an impossibility. For even if we don't believe in miracles, they are there, and they are waiting for us to find them.

When you are broken, you run. But you don't always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards. My reasons weren't White's, but I was running just the same.

I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness.

I roll a magazine into a tube and peer at her through it as if it were a telescope...She pushes her beak into it as far as it will go, biting the empty air inside. Putting my mouth to my side of my paper telescope I boom into it: 'Hello, Mabel.' She pulls her beak free. All the feathers on her forehead are raised. She shakes her tail rapidly from side to side and shivers with happiness.

He looks at Rao. Turns in his seat and looks. Sunil Rao, bane of Adam's career, world saver, royal pain in the ass, and genuinely the love of Adam's life.

That I have remembered what it is, and how it can be done. But watching television from the sofa later that evening I notice tears running from my eyes and dropping into my mug of tea. Odd, I think. I put it down to tiredness. Perhaps I am getting a cold. Perhaps

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. The summer lunch recedes.

We drive into a strange, windless, sunny afternoon that makes everything resemble hollow metal models painted with enamel. Clouds, swags of leaves, houses. All in the same plane, like a stage-set, and riveted together. The air smells of woodsmoke.

Collecting things like this, I realised, must have stitched together their broken world of rubble, made sense of a world disordered by war. And

There was nothing that was such a salve to my grieving heart as the hawk returning.

Human hands are for holding other hands. Human arms are for holding other humans close.

A magpie flies like a frying pan!'8 he could write, with the joy of discovering something new in the world. And it is that joy, that childish delight in the lives of creatures other than man, that I love most in White. He was a complicated man, and an unhappy one. But he knew also that the world was full of simple miracles.