Top 90 Helen Macdonald Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Some things happen only once, twice in a lifetime. The world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might be alive to see them.”

— Helen Macdonald

2. “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, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.”

— Helen Macdonald

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

— Helen Macdonald

4. “Hawks aren’t social animals like dogs or horses; they understand neither coercion nor punishment. The only way to tame them is through positive reinforcement with gifts of food. You want the hawk to eat the food you hold – it’s the first step in reclaiming her that will end with you being hunting partners.”

— Helen Macdonald

5. “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.”

— Helen Macdonald

6. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.”

— Helen Macdonald

7. “In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: ‘Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.’ He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.”

— Helen Macdonald

8. “When you are broken, you run. But you don’t always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards.”

— Helen Macdonald

9. “The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane.”

— Helen Macdonald

10. “What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later... what the mind does after losing one’s father isn’t just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.”

— Helen Macdonald

11. “We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.”

— Helen Macdonald

12. “The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away. There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge. My flight from death was on her barred and beating wings. But I had forgotten that the puzzle that was death was caught up in the hawk, and I was caught up in it too.”

— Helen Macdonald

13. “It’s not an untouched wilderness like a mountaintop, but a ramshackle wildness in which people and the land have conspired to strangeness.”

— Helen Macdonald

14. “It struck me then that perhaps the bareness and wrongness of the world was an illusion; that things might still be real, and right, and beautiful, even if I could not see them – that if I stood in the right place, and was lucky, this might somehow be revealed to me.”

— Helen Macdonald

15. “Like White I wanted to cut loose from the world, and I shared, too, his desire to escape to the wild, a desire that can rip away all human softness and leave you stranded in a world of savage, courteous despair.”

— Helen Macdonald

16. “Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes.”

— Helen Macdonald

17. “Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived whenever grief is experienced in later life. She thought that adults try to manage newer losses the way they managed older ones.”

— Helen Macdonald

18. “Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.”

— Helen Macdonald

19. “Deep in the muddled darkness six copper pheasant feathers glowed in a cradle of blackthorn.”

— Helen Macdonald

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

— Helen Macdonald

21. “Now that Dad was gone I was starting to see how mortality was bound up in things like that cold, arc-lit sky. How the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Once, twice. Perhaps never again.”

— Helen Macdonald

22. “I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing – not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of.”

— Helen Macdonald

23. “It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.”

— Helen Macdonald

24. “I was holding a small clump of reindeer moss in one hand, a little piece of that branching, pale green-grey lichen that can survive just about anything the world throws at it. It is patience made manifest. Keep reindeer moss in the dark, freeze it, dry it to a crisp, it won’t die. It goes dormant and waits for things to improve. Impressive stuff.”

— Helen Macdonald

25. “Like a good academic, I thought books were for answers.”

— Helen Macdonald

26. “On the way home I felt a great and simple sadness. I missed my dad. I missed him very much.”

— Helen Macdonald

27. “Promises that are broken, again and again, through fear, through loss of nerve, through any number of things that hide that deep desire, at heart, to obliterate one’s broken self.”

— Helen Macdonald

28. “I know now that I’m not trusting anyone or anything any more. And 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.”

— Helen Macdonald

29. “The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.”

— Helen Macdonald

30. “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.”

— Helen Macdonald

31. “I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.”

— Helen Macdonald

32. “Someone once told me that every writer has a subject that underlies everything they write. It can be love or death, betrayal or belonging, home or hope or exile. I choose to think that my subject is love, and most specifically love for the glittering world of non-human life around us.”

— Helen Macdonald

33. “He did all the right things: flew aeroplanes, shot, fished for salmon, hunted; and even better, all the wrong things: kept grass snakes in his room, rode his horse up the school steps on match days, and best of all, published racy novels under the pseudonym James Aston.”

— Helen Macdonald

34. “The people setting out on these walks weren’t seeking to conquer peaks or test themselves against maps and miles. They were looking for a mystical communion with the land; they walked backwards in time to an imagined past suffused with magical, native glamour:.”

— Helen Macdonald

35. “Mabel stops looking murderous and assumes an expression of severe truculence. How the hell, I imagine her thinking, am I supposed to catch things with this idiot in tow?”

— Helen Macdonald

36. “Wild things are made from human histories.”

— Helen Macdonald

37. “There’s a special phenomenology to walking in woods in winter.”

— Helen Macdonald

38. “I can’t, even now, arrange it in the right order. The memories are like heavy blocks of glass. I can put them down in different places but they don’t make a story.”

— Helen Macdonald

39. “And I found there were myriad definitions of this thing called tragedy that had wormed its way through the history of literature; and the simplest of all was this: that it is the story of a figure who, through some moral flaw or personal failing, falls through force of circumstance to his doom.”

— Helen Macdonald

40. “There was nothing that was such a salve to my grieving heart as the hawk returning.”

— Helen Macdonald

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

— Helen Macdonald

42. “Hands are for other human hands to hold.”

— Helen Macdonald

43. “There’s a superstition among falconers that a hawk’s ability is inversely proportional to the ferocity of its name. Call a hawk Tiddles and it will be a formidable hunter; call it Spitfire or Slayer and it will probably refuse to fly at all.”

— Helen Macdonald

44. “A magpie flies like a frying pan!’8 he could write, with the joy of discovering something new in the world. And it is that joy, that childish delight in the lives of creatures other than man, that I love most in White. He was a complicated man, and an unhappy one. But he knew also that the world was full of simple miracles.”

— Helen Macdonald

45. “When I was small I’d loved falconry’s historical glamour. I treasured it in the same way children treasure the hope that they might be like the children in books: secretly magical, part of some deeper, mysterious world that makes them something out of the ordinary.”

— Helen Macdonald

46. “For years he’d lived by the maxim Henry Green put so beautifully in his public-school memoir Pack My Bag: ‘The safest way to avoid trouble if one may not be going to fit is to take as great a part as possible in what is going on.’12 To gain approval, to avoid trouble, he had to mirror what was around him: it was how he had tried to win love from his mother as a child. It was a life of perpetual disguise.”

— Helen Macdonald

47. “Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all affliction,’ wrote John Muir. ‘Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal.’ Now I knew this for what it was: a beguiling but dangerous lie. I was furious with myself and my own conscious certainty that t his was the cure I needed. Hands are for other humans to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.”

— Helen Macdonald

48. “And when I look again she seems neither bird nor reptile, but a creature shaped by a million years of evolution for a life she’s not yet lived.”

— Helen Macdonald

49. “I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness.”

— Helen Macdonald

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

— Helen Macdonald