Quotes About Connection

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.

So the thing is, you all share the same kind of pain, exactly the same, but you're too busy experiencing total agony to feel anything other than completely alone. That's what it's like!' I

It wasn't just that I saw in his book, reflected backwards and dimly, my own retreat into wildness. It was this: of all the books I read as a child, his was the only one I remembered where the animal didn't die.

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.

Being sworn at by woodland creatures is disquieting, but comforting too...these alarm calls remind me that we have consequential presence, that the animals we like to watch are creatures with their own needs, desires, emotions, lives.

Concentrate on why you're here, I tell myself. You have a hawk to fly. Ever since my father died I'd had these bouts of derealisation, strange episodes where the world became unrecognisable.

They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.

Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.

The goshawk is staring at me in mortal terror, and I can feel the silences between both our heartbeats coincide. Her eyes are luminous, silver in the gloom. Her beak is open. She breathes hot hawk breath in my face. It smells of pepper and musk and burned stone. Her feathers are half-raised and her wings half-open, and her scaled yellow toes and curved black talons grip the glove tightly. It feels like I'm holding a flaming torch.

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

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.

he lifted the fat and frightened hawk onto his fist reciting it passages from Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II, Othello-- 'but tragedy had to be kept out of the voice'-- and all the sonnets he could remember, whistling hymns to it, playing it Gilbert and Sullivan and Italian opera, and deciding, on reflection, that hawks liked Shakespeare best.

Gos had steely pinions and a mad marigold eye, and hopped and flew and mantled his great wings over a fist of raw liver. He cheeped like a songbird and was terrified of cars. I liked Gos. Gos was comprehensible, even if the writer was utterly beyond understanding.

I remembered the man I'd fallen for after my father died. I'd hardly known him, but it didn't matter. I'd recruited him to serve my loss, made him everything I needed.

I can't help but think of a line written by the poet Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude.

I know now 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.

What we see in the lives of animals are lessons we've learned from the world.

You don't know anything about them, but you feel the other person's there, one friend told me. It's like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow. History

These alarm calls remind me that we have consequential presence, that the animals we like to watch are creatures with their own needs, desires, emotions, lives.

She breathes hot hawk breath in my face.

There were days when he touched the tip of her nose and it was enough, a miracle of plenty.

Would that be dangerous, to not look while being looked at?