Helen Macdonald quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Helen Macdonald

Helen Macdonald Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Helen Macdonald on Wise Famous Quotes.

Consider this, and in our time As the hawk sees it, or the helmeted airman:

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

The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.

The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater. Things sat in it, dark and very still.

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

For a boy who always felt imperilled, that pitch-black cave was a refuge, and he returned to it in his imagination again and again.

The Once and Future King. By T. H. White,

writing those lines in his small kitchen, the light wet on the oilskin tablecloth, the night close against the window.

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

Deep in the muddled darkness six copper pheasant feathers glowed in a cradle of blackthorn.

Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes.

The suffering of his body is as naught to the joy of being free from the pain of being seen.

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

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

it seems very extraordinary that the complex psychology of a human being can be taught with a stick.

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

His mother lavished attention on her dogs and her husband had them shot. She lavished attention on the boy and the boy was convinced he'd be next.

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

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

Hands are for other human hands to hold.

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

Like a good academic, I thought books were for answers.

Looking for goshwawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don't get to say when or how.

I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.

Wild things are made from human histories.

What makes you a chaffinch?

war was the fault of the 'masters of men, everywhere, who subconsciously thrust others into suffering in order to advance their own powers'.28

I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates

Stimulus: opera. Response: kill.

We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.

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

It must have been like death,'3 he wrote, 'the thing which we can never know beforehand.

She is unsure about dogs. Big dogs, that is. Small dogs fascinate her for other reasons.

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

No war can ever be just air.

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

When you are broken, you run. But you don't always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards.