Top 69 Helen Macdonald Quotes
#1. To read Helen Macdonald's memoir, H Is for Hawk, is to feel as though Emily Bronte just turned up at your door, trailing all the windy, feral outdoors into your living room.
Maureen Corrigan
#2. war was the fault of the 'masters of men, everywhere, who subconsciously thrust others into suffering in order to advance their own powers'.28
Helen Macdonald
#3. She is unsure about dogs. Big dogs, that is. Small dogs fascinate her for other reasons.
Helen Macdonald
#4. When you are broken, you run. But you don't always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards.
Helen Macdonald
#5. By skilfully training a hunting animal, by closely associating with it, by identifying with it, you might be allowed to experience all your vital, sincere desires, even your most bloodthirsty ones, in total innocence. You could be true to yourself.
Helen Macdonald
#6. Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived when grief is experience in later life.
Helen Macdonald
#7. When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe any more. Being an expert opens you up to judgement.
Helen Macdonald
#8. On the way home I felt a great and simple sadness. I missed my dad. I missed him very much.
Helen Macdonald
#9. anybody who has spent two months training a goshawk, knowing that it will be fatal even to give the creature even a cross look,' the man says, 'it seems very extraordinary that the complex psychology of a human being can be taught with a stick.' Sitting
Helen Macdonald
#10. Like a good academic, I thought books were for answers.
Helen Macdonald
#11. it seems very extraordinary that the complex psychology of a human being can be taught with a stick.
Helen Macdonald
#12. I remember thinking of the passage in The Sword in the Stone where a falconer took a goshawk back onto his own fist, 'reassuming him like a lame man putting on his accustomed wooden leg, after it had been lost'.
Helen Macdonald
#13. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.
Helen Macdonald
#14. 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.
Helen Macdonald
#15. Mabel stops looking murderous and assumes an expression of severe truculence. How the hell, I imagine her thinking, am I supposed to catch things with this idiot in tow?
Helen Macdonald
#17. I know how to do this, I thought. I am good, at least, at this. I know all the steps to this dance
Helen Macdonald
#19. 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.
Helen Macdonald
#20. children treasure the hope that they might be like the children in books: secretly magical, part of some deeper, mysterious world that makes them something out of the ordinary.
Helen Macdonald
#21. 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.
Helen Macdonald
#22. What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later... what the mind does after losing one's father isn't just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.
Helen Macdonald
#23. The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.
Helen Macdonald
#24. 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
Helen Macdonald
#25. I wish that we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are. I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness.
Helen Macdonald
#26. When I was writing the speech, still a little concussed, I reached for the phone to call my father and ask what type of plane it was, and for a moment the world went very black.
Helen Macdonald
#27. His glasses, carefully folded, placed in my mum's outstretched hand. His coat. An envelope. His watch. His shoes. And when we left, clutching a plastic bag with his belongings, the clouds were still there,
Helen Macdonald
#28. Elusive, spectacular, utterly at home, the fact of these British goshawks makes me happy. 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. It
Helen Macdonald
#29. Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes.
Helen Macdonald
#30. 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.
Helen Macdonald
#31. Goshawks are nervous because they live life ten times faster than we do, and they react to stimuli literally without thinking.
Helen Macdonald
#32. Vast flocks of fieldfares netted the sky, turning it to something strangely like a sixteenth-century sleeve sewn with pearls.
Helen Macdonald
#33. There was nothing that was such a salve to my grieving heart as the hawk returning.
Helen Macdonald
#34. Here's a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It's from the Old English bereafian, meaning 'to deprive of, take away, seize, rob'. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.
Helen Macdonald
#35. The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater. Things sat in it, dark and very still.
Helen Macdonald
#37. Looking for goshwawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don't get to say when or how.
Helen Macdonald
#38. Deep in the muddled darkness six copper pheasant feathers glowed in a cradle of blackthorn.
Helen Macdonald
#39. The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.
Helen Macdonald
#40. 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.
Helen Macdonald
#41. White had learned that going back in time was a way of fixing things; uncovering past traumas, revisiting them and defusing their power.
Helen Macdonald
#43. It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.
Helen Macdonald
#44. Tony is waiting outside, his eyes crinkled into a smile. 'Come inside the house,' he says. He knows what I am feeling. And in I go, where the dogs lie flat on the kitchen floor, tails wagging, and the kettle is whistling, and the house is very warm.
Helen Macdonald
#45. And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love.
Helen Macdonald
#46. The people setting out on these walks weren't seeking to conquer peaks or test themselves against maps and miles. They were looking for a mystical communion with the land; they walked backwards in time to an imagined past suffused with magical, native glamour:
Helen Macdonald
#47. ...that when you wanted to see something very badly,sometimes you had to stay still,stay in the same place, remember how much you wanted to see it,and be patient.If you want to see hawks you have to be patient too.
Helen Macdonald
#48. Have you ever watched a deer walking out from cover? They step, stop, and stay, motionless, nose to the air, looking and smelling. A nervous twitch might run down their flanks. And then, reassured that all is safe, they ankle their way out of the brush to graze.
Helen Macdonald
#49. the austringer, the solitary trainer of goshawks and sparrowhawks, has had a pretty terrible press.
Helen Macdonald
#50. In the half-light through the drawn curtains she sits on her perch, relaxed, hooded, extraordinary. Formidable talons, wicked, curved black beak, sleek, cafe-au-lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-coloured teardrops, looking for all the world like some cappuccino samurai.
Helen Macdonald
#51. Consider this, and in our time As the hawk sees it, or the helmeted airman:
Helen Macdonald
#52. This region was the centre of the flint industry in Neolithic times. And later, it became famous for rabbits farmed for meat and felt.
Helen Macdonald
#53. 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.
Helen Macdonald
#54. I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.
Helen Macdonald
#55. It must have been like death,'3 he wrote, 'the thing which we can never know beforehand.
Helen Macdonald
#56. But the only things I knew were hawkish things, and the lines that drew me across the landscape were the lines that drew the hawk: hunger, desire, fascination, the need to find and fly and kill.
Helen Macdonald
#57. The suffering of his body is as naught to the joy of being free from the pain of being seen.
Helen Macdonald
#58. I can't, even now, arrange it in the right order. The memories are like heavy blocks of glass. I can put them down in different places but they don't make a story.
Helen Macdonald
#59. writing those lines in his small kitchen, the light wet on the oilskin tablecloth, the night close against the window.
Helen Macdonald
#60. good man's example always does instruct the ignorant and lessens their rage, little by little through the ages, until the spirit of the waters is content,
Helen Macdonald
#61. Clouds of linnets bounce, half-midges, half musical notation, along the hedges surrounding my old home, and all is out of sorts as far as that notion of home lies because my father isn't here.
Helen Macdonald
#62. There's a superstition among falconers that a hawk's ability is inversely proportional to the ferocity of its name. Call a hawk Tiddles and it will be a formidable hunter; call it Spitfire or Slayer and it will probably refuse to fly at all.
Helen Macdonald
#65. I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates
Helen Macdonald
#66. and it was there, standing on the edge of a village playing field, that I gratefully stepped into novicehood again, as if I had never seen a hawk in my life.
Helen Macdonald
#67. The hawk is on my fist. Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket; a being whose world is drawn in plots and vectors that pull her towards lives' ends.
Helen Macdonald
#68. Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.
Helen Macdonald
#69. I learned that to harden your heart was not the same as not caring.
Helen Macdonald
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
