110 Quotes by Helen Macdonald

Wild things are made from human histories.

Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’.

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.

Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.

For there’s an immense intellectual pleasure involved in making identifications, and each time you learn to recognise a new species of animal or plant, the natural world becomes a more complicated and remarkable place, pulling intricate variety out of a background blur of nameless grey and green.

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

It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.

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.

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