Top 90 Helen Macdonald Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There’s little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss?”

— Helen Macdonald

52. “We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.”

— Helen Macdonald

53. “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

54. “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

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. “Human hands are for holding other hands. Human arms are for holding other humans close.”

— Helen Macdonald

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

— Helen Macdonald

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

— Helen Macdonald

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

— Helen Macdonald

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

— Helen Macdonald

62. “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

63. “To anybody who has spent two months training a goshawk, knowing that it will be fatal even to give the creature even a cross look,’ the man says, ’it seems very extraordinary that the complex psychology of a human being can be taught with a stick.”

— Helen Macdonald

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

— Helen Macdonald

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Helen Macdonald

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Helen Macdonald

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

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. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Helen Macdonald

87. “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

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. “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

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

— Helen Macdonald

91. “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

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

— Helen Macdonald