Top 90 Helen Macdonald Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Helen Macdonald

55. “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.”

— Helen Macdonald

56. “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.”

— Helen Macdonald

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

— Helen Macdonald

58. “Looking for goshwawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how.”

— Helen Macdonald

59. “And I was sure it was the drink that irrigated White’s self-sabotage, for it is the common trait of alcoholics to make plans and promises, to oneself, to others, fervently, sincerely, and in hope of redemption. 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

60. “Literature can teach us the qualitative texture of the world. And we need it to. We need to communicate the value of things, so that more of us might fight to save them.”

— Helen Macdonald

61. “Stimulus: opera. Response: kill.”

— Helen Macdonald

62. “I know how to do this, I thought. I am good, at least, at this. I know all the steps to this dance.”

— Helen Macdonald

63. “Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human.”

— Helen Macdonald

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

— Helen Macdonald

65. “Hands are for other human hands 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

66. “The hawk is on my fist. Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket; a being whose world is drawn in plots and vectors that pull her towards lives’ ends.”

— Helen Macdonald

67. “The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.”

— Helen Macdonald

68. “We so often think of the past as a something like a nature reserve: a discrete, bounded place we can visit in our imaginations to make us feel better. I wonder how we could learn to recognise that the past is always working on us and through us, and that diversity in all its forms, human and natural, is strength.”

— Helen Macdonald

69. “What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later. Even as I watched I’d half-realised Prideaux was a figure I’d picked out for a father. But what I should have realised, too, on those northern roads, is that 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

70. “I wish that we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are. I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness.”

— Helen Macdonald

71. “I learned that to harden your heart was not the same as not caring.”

— Helen Macdonald

72. “At times of difficulty, watching birds ushers you into a different world, where no words need to be spoken.”

— Helen Macdonald

73. “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.”

— Helen Macdonald

74. “I roll a magazine into a tube and peer at her through it as if it were a telescope... She pushes her beak into it as far as it will go, biting the empty air inside. Putting my mouth to my side of my paper telescope I boom into it: ‘Hello, Mabel.’ She pulls her beak free. All the feathers on her forehead are raised. She shakes her tail rapidly from side to side and shivers with happiness.”

— Helen Macdonald

75. “Because this story struck me as extraordinary, and it still does. Once upon a time there was a man in a spacesuit in a secret reconnaissance plane reading The Once and Future King, that great historical epic, that comic, tragic, romantic retelling of the Arthurian legend that tussles with questions of war and aggression, and might, and right, and the matter of what a nation is or might be.”

— Helen Macdonald

76. “Though White had fled from the world of school, he never escaped the models it had given him on how to conduct his life. At school you had to pass tests and ordeals to prove you were brave. You tested your bravery in the playing fields, and through the beatings by masters and prefects. And there were the ceremonies of cruelty of the boys themselves: the initiations and ordeals that were the price of entrance into the school, and later into boys’ secret societies.”

— Helen Macdonald

77. “There is a kind of coldness that allows interrogators to put cloth over the mouths of men and pour water into their lungs, and lets them believe this is not torture. What you do to your heart. You stand apart from yourself, as if your souls could be a migrant beast too, standing some way away from the horror, and looking fixedly at the sky.”

— Helen Macdonald

78. “Collecting things like this, I realised, must have stitched together their broken world of rubble, made sense of a world disordered by war. And.”

— Helen Macdonald

79. “That little space of irresolution is a strange place to be. You feel safe because you are entirely at the world’s mercy. It is a rush. You lose yourself in it. And so you run towards those little shots of fate, where the world turns. That is the lure: that is why we lose ourselves, when powerless from hurt and grief, in drugs or gambling or drink; in addictions that collar the broken soul and shake it like a dog.”

— Helen Macdonald

80. “By skilfully training a hunting animal, by closely associating with it, by identifying with it, you might be allowed to experience all your vital, sincere desires, even your most bloodthirsty ones, in total innocence. You could be true to yourself.”

— Helen Macdonald

81. “What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has done.”

— Helen Macdonald

82. “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.”

— Helen Macdonald

83. “For even if we don’t believe in miracles, they are there, and they are waiting for us to find them.”

— Helen Macdonald

84. “We drive into a strange, windless, sunny afternoon that makes everything resemble hollow metal models painted with enamel. Clouds, swags of leaves, houses. All in the same plane, like a stage-set, and riveted together. The air smells of woodsmoke.”

— Helen Macdonald

85. “When you are broken, you run. But you don’t always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards. My reasons weren’t White’s, but I was running just the same.”

— Helen Macdonald

86. “Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference. 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.”

— Helen Macdonald

87. “He looks at Rao. Turns in his seat and looks. Sunil Rao, bane of Adam’s career, world saver, royal pain in the ass, and genuinely the love of Adam’s life.”

— Helen Macdonald

88. “I’ve used tarot too. Not often. But sufficient to know how little use the cards are in divining the future and to see how unerringly the cards reflect my deepest states of being, emotions I’d not let myself feel at the time.”

— Helen Macdonald

89. “There are actions we can take that seem impossible and pointless and yet they are entirely, and precisely, and absolutely required. We can exert pressure, we can speak up, we can march and cry and mourn and sing and hope and fight for the world, standing with others, even if we don’t believe it. Even if change seems an impossibility. For even if we don’t believe in miracles, they are there, and they are waiting for us to find them.”

— Helen Macdonald

90. “That I have remembered what it is, and how it can be done. But watching television from the sofa later that evening I notice tears running from my eyes and dropping into my mug of tea. Odd, I think. I put it down to tiredness. Perhaps I am getting a cold. Perhaps.”

— Helen Macdonald

91. “History and hawks and hoods and the implications of taking something’s sight away to calm it.”

— Helen Macdonald

92. “He was a complicated man, and an unhappy one. But he knew also that the world was full of simple miracles.”

— Helen Macdonald