Top 70 Charlotte McConaghy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless. I leave for no reason, just to be moving, and it breaks my heart a thousand times, a million.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

2. “I feel that deep and terrible binding for what it is, I know its face and its name, and it’s not a binding at all, but love, and maybe that’s the same king of thing after all.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

3. “The stronger you are, the more dangerous the world.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

4. “A man’s anger, his violence, is no one’s responsibility but his own.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

5. “It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

6. “I think it’s civilization makes us violent. We infect each other.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

7. “A woman’s beauty is in her strength and her passion.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

8. “And then I stopped thinking about Prince Ambrose of Pirenti, because he was destroying me.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

9. “There are languages without words and violence is one of them.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

10. “I think there is meaning, and it lives in nurturing, in making life sweeter for ourselves, and for those around us.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

11. “It’s not life I’m tired of, with its astonishing ocean currents and layers of ice and all the delicate feathers that make up a wing. It’s myself.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

12. “I smile. “There are languages without words, without voices. I’ll teach them to you.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

13. “The Arctic tern has the longest migration of any animal. It flies from the Arctic all the way to the Antarctic, and then back again within a year. This is an extraordinarily long flight for a bird its size. And because the terns live to be thirty or so, the distance they will travel over the course of their lives is the equivalent of flying to the moon and back three times.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

14. “Who has ever loved as boldly as he does?”

— Charlotte McConaghy

15. “It’s simple, being hurt. But it’s complicated, loving someone.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

16. “Sitting here now, in the uppermost part of this boat, I would give anything, any part of me – my flesh or my blood or my very heart itself – to be back inside one of those nights, standing beside her in the dark, she who infuriated and confused me, she who was unknowable and unreachable, she who loved me when no one else did, only I was too intent on loneliness to see it.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

17. “My father used to say the world turned wrong when we started separating ourselves from the wild, when we stopped being one with the rest of nature, and sat apart.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

18. “She was abstractly beautiful, as I had always wished to be, but I now found her ugly, understanding as I did now that real beauty simply came from happiness.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

19. “We’re the only planet that has oceans. In all the known universe, we’re the only one sitting in the perfect spot for them, not too hot and not too cold, and it’s the only reason we’re alive, because it’s the ocean that creates the oxygen we need to breathe.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

20. “Even though they are as varied as a group of people can be, I can tell they are the same, all of these sailors. Something was missing in their lives on land, and they went seeking the answer. Whatever it was, I don’t doubt for a second that they each found it. They are migrants of land, and they love it out here on an ocean that offered them a different way of life, they love this boat, and, as much as they may bicker and fight, they love each other.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

21. “But there won’t be any more journeys after this one, no more oceans explored. And maybe that’s why I am filled with calm. My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless. I leave for no reason, just to be moving, and it breaks my heart a thousand times, a million.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

22. “I shrugged a little helplessly. ‘We have no say, in this life, in how hard things will be. What we can control is how hard we fight. How long we endure. How strongly we love.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

23. “And that was when I realised I wasn’t the strongest man in the world after all. I was the weakest.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

24. “I can’t move to pull on my clothes except that somehow I do, and I can’t stand on two feet except that somehow I do, and I can’t walk, there’s no way I can walk, except I do. I take step after step after step after step.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

25. “It’s impossible to control someone else’s capacity for forgiveness.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

26. “All these humans have left no space for anything else.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

27. “What makes a young thing like you so tired of life?”

— Charlotte McConaghy

28. “If you truly think wolves are the blood spillers, then you’re blind... We do that. We are the people killers, the children killers. We’re the monsters.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

29. “I don’t know how to force the world into a shape I can manage.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

30. “Mirror-touch synesthesia. My brain re-creates the sensory experiences of living creatures, of all people and even sometimes animals; if I see it I feel it, and for just a moment I am them, we are one and their pain or pleasure is my own.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

31. “The world he describes, empty of wild creatures and places, overrun instead by people and their agriculture, is a dying world.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

32. “Then again, it’s a fool who tries to protect a creature from its own instincts.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

33. “Don’t, I whisper, inside. Don’t leave. But I know she must. It’s in her nature.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

34. “How lonely it will be here, when it’s just us.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

35. “I never worked out how to be relied upon and also free.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

36. “My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

37. “It has been decided by our leaders that economic growth is more important. That the extinction crisis is an acceptable trade for their greed.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

38. “All creatures know love, Dad used to say. All creatures.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

39. “But the rhythms of the sea’s tides are the only things we humans have not yet destroyed.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

40. “The only true threat to birds that has ever existed is us.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

41. “There are two worlds. One is made of water and earth, of rock and minerals. It has a core, a mantle and a crust, and oxygen for breathing. The other is made of fear.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

42. “I tried for Niall, like I did for my mother. I really did. But the rhythms of the sea’s tides are the only things we humans have not yet destroyed.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

43. “There is hardly anything wild left, and this is a fate we are, all of us, intimately aware of.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

44. “Saving specific animals purely on the basis of what they offer humanity may be practical, but wasn’t this attitude the problem to begin with? Our overwhelming, annihilating selfishness?”

— Charlotte McConaghy

45. “Only quiet is a different beast when it finds you. A perfect kind of thing until you have it and it turns on you.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

46. “We’d read while we balanced on the low rock walls that Seamus Heaney made famous in his poetry. A way to leave without really leaving.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

47. “We all have that choice, and most of us make it. There is cruelty to survive, to fight against, but there is gentleness more than anything, our roots deep and entangled.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

48. “I’m not minimizing. It’s just that if you paint a picture of him as a monster then you make him mythical, but men who hurt women are just men.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

49. “And when you open your heart to rewilding a landscape, the truth is, you’re opening your heart to rewilding yourself.”

— Charlotte McConaghy

50. “It is easy to tell myself that what passes between them is only biology, nature, but then who said love does not exist in the nature of all things?”

— Charlotte McConaghy