110 Quotes by Helen Macdonald

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, [...]

Sometimes when light dawns it simply illuminates how dismal circumstances have become.

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.

You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

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

The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.

(N)ot everything fits easily into our systems of classification. The world might be, it turns out, too complicated for us to know.

When we meet animals for the first time, we expect them to conform to the stories we've heard about them. But there is always, always a gap. The boar was still a surprise. Animals are.

So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it, setting ourselves against it, defining our humanity against it.