4 Quotes by Gavin Maxwell

We have long laboured under an obtuse presupposition that the senses by which other living creatures perceive their world must to a great extent resemble our own; but in fact we are, by scientific invention, only now beginning to approach methods of perception that the whales have always owned as their birthright.

There is something deeply awe-inspiring about the sight of any living creatures in incomputable numbers; it stirs, perhaps, some atavistic chord whose note belongs more properly to the distant days when we were a true part of the animal ecology; when the sight of another species in unthinkable hosts brought fears or hopes no longer applicable.

I have more than once tried to analyse this apparently deliberate form of self-torture that seems common to so many people in face of the extinction of a valued life, human or animal, and it springs, I think, from a negation of death, as if by summoning and arranging these subjective images one were in some way cheating the objective fact. It is, I believe, an entirely instinctive process, and the distress it brings with it is an incidental, a by-product, rather than a masochistic end.

Hi - I wonder whether you may be able to help me, I am searching for a quotation for which I have been asked to produce a painting for. The quotation (I was told) came from Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell and was very apt for the painting, it described a flight of Whooper swans flying home against a stormy sky. I have searched in vain for my own copy of ROB (since we moved house it has not yet been found), and online for the quote. But to no avail.