24 Quotes by Paul Kingsnorth

Yes there were giants in the Earth it was real all of it. All of the stories they told you when you were a child they were all true. Imagine that. Imagine if adulthood is the fairy tale and childhood is the reality. Imagine giants’ graves all over the land and the motorways roaring past them and it is the motorways which are the romantic lies.

Old things climb out through my mouth and set themselves free in the air. On the high moor there are patterns and in my small mind there are patterns. [...] All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time.

To Robinson Jeffers, craggy old California poet, beauty was an objective external reality, something which existed outside of us, in 'the pristine granite' of the cliffs and mountains, not simply a product of human aesthetics. 'The beauty of things was born before eyes,' he wrote, 'and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty / Will remain when there is no heart to break for it,

Destruction minus carbon equals sustainability.

Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is a story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequence. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story.

The coming decades are likely to challenge much of what we think we know about what progress is, and about who we are in relation to the rest of nature. Can you think, or act, like the librarian of a monastery through the Dark Ages, guarding the old books as empires rise and fall outside?

A case could be made, in fact, that the English were the first victims of the British empire: without their conquest, that empire could not have been built.

Today, the real England sometimes feels like 50 million people driving around a motorway forever.

I wonder if every animal is a spirit... What if they are all spirits sent to you and how you treat them is what you are.