Quotes from Helen Humphreys

With her right index finger she slowly spells words on Grace's skin. Don't let me go crazy. The moon is pale and vast. The stars so sharp they almost hurt.

The Moment opens. The moment closes. There is sunlight. There is frost. There is the brief idea of roses amid the patch of weeds.

Sometimes life seems very unfair.

If you pretend to feel a certain way, eventually you do feel that way. That has been a surprisingly pleasant lesson to learn in life.

It's so hard to get life right, she thinks, pulling the blanket tight around her shoulders. All the small balances are impossible to strike most of the time. And then there are the larger choices. It's hopeless. She might as well be one of those gannets, tossed about by the gusts of wind that drive up from the Atlantic.

Who? Mr. Dalton has his hand firmly on Grace's elbow, as though she can't manoeuvre herself through the blockade of tables and chairs. She could fly right through you, thinks Jack.

Dark is just light turned inside out, thinks Maddy. Why be afraid of that?

I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to.

The period before something learns to be afraid is the most dangerous of all, because it is then the creatures are the most vulnerable.

It's better to have no secrets. Lies are always harder to manage than the truth.

Loneliness is sometimes cured by visiting with people, and sometimes it's made worse by the same thing.

Time doesn't really soften anything. Memories heave up, you know.

Forgetting takes practice…You have to work at it.

This is why James likes birds- because they are all possibility. They make a line in the aid, the invisible line of their flight, and this line can join up with other lines or lead somewhere entirely new. All you have to do is believe that the line exists and learn how to follow it. And sometimes life will make this same invisible line for him, make him see where he came from, what he is attached to.

Flight is not the astonishing thing. I have always thought that the miracle of birds is not that they fly, but that they touch down.

All those days of walking the heath, collecting her specimens, reinforced in her a need to look to the natural world for her own location. Now, even in London, she is constantly searching out the trees and grass, the flowers, to determine her position in the urban landscape. She looks to the natural world to guide her in how she moves through the city, in how she thinks about her own life.

If there's no apparent reason for something to change, then why does it change? Is it a dog's nature to vary behaviour when life becomes too comfortable? Is it ours?

The people who lived beside the river for thousands of years, and whose history was intertwined with that landscape, have been very effectively excluded from ts recorded narrative.

We have built our houses between what is fluid and what is fixed.

I can feel the heat blossoms on your skin.

The stars wire the sky together and the crickets fill the shadows of the earth with their breath.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds", says Mrs. Phillips. "Our members will not be allowed to wear, or buy, ant hats with feathers, and they must devote themselves to the cause of protecting the birds and discouraging their wanton destruction.

we catch a glimpse of white fur flashing by inside the bars of the woods.

I just stuffed it into the container of my dream.