Quotes from Helen Macdonald

this' – and he mimed holding it to his eye. 'Look through the viewfinder. Stops you being involved. Stops you being scared.' You no longer possess a body to fall or fail: all that exists is a square of finely ground glass and the world seen through it, and a whole mass of technical decisions in your head about exposure and depth of field and getting the shot you hope for. Sitting there with the hawk

I couldn't let that suffering happen. Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human.

Something impossibly heavy that held me in thrall, a scrap of the divine not good for my soul, a thing that should never have been fixed in place on tape to be repeatedly overheard, a thing that stood between me and the telling of secrets.

The air reeked of pine resin and the pitchy vinegar of wood ants.

My father's life wasn't about disappearance. His was a life that worked against it. He'd come home from work

And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love.

There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge.

And when we left, clutching a plastic bag with his belongings, the clouds were still there, a frieze of motionless cumulus over the Thames flat as a matte painting on glass.

the austringer, the solitary trainer of goshawks and sparrowhawks, has had a pretty terrible press.

Huge bouts of déjà vu. Coincidences. Memories of things that hadn't happened yet. Time didn't run forwards any more. It was a solid thing you could press yourself against and feel it push back; a thick fluid, half-air, half-glass, that flowed both ways and sent ripples of recollection forwards and new events backwards so that new things I encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past.

Low clouds move fast over the Ridings. It is raining hard. The cattle lie under the trees in the gale, their flanks dark and soaked, their breaths steaming in the air.

I had only just escaped from humanity,' White wrote, 'and the poor gos had only just been caught by it.

Old because her feet were gnarled and dusty, her eyes a deep, fiery orange, and she was beautiful. Beautiful like a granite cliff or a thunder-cloud.

I'd turned myself into a hawk – taken all the traits of goshawks in the books and made them my own.

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

one honey fungus in Oregon covers almost four square miles and is thought to be nearly two and a half thousand years old.

cannot remember that my heart stopped beating at any particular time,' he wrote in his diary. 'The blow was so stunning, so final after six weeks of unremitting faith, that it was tempered to me as being beyond my appreciation. Death will be like this, something too vast to hurt much or perhaps even to upset me.' His

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

This region was the centre of the flint industry in Neolithic times. And later, it became famous for rabbits farmed for meat and felt.

It's part of being a watcher, forgetting who you are and putting yourself in the thing you are watching. That

You cannot know what it is like to be a bat by screwing your eyes tight, imagining membranous wings, finding your way through darkness by talking to it in tones that reply to you with the shape of the world.

And I was sure that it was the drink that irrigated White's constant self-sabotage, for it is a common trait of alcoholics to make plans and promises, to oneself, to others, fervently, sincerely, and in hope of redemption. 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.

my gentleness is a veneer on raging despair.

Goshawks are nervous because they live life ten times faster than we do, and they react to stimuli literally without thinking.