“And I was sure it was the drink that irrigated White’s self-sabotage, for it is the common trait of alcoholics to make… — Helen Macdonald Alcoholic Copy Share Image
“White called Prisonface to life in order that he should suffer, be punished, mocked, reduced to rags and die.” — Helen Macdonald Life Copy Share Image
“You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And… — Helen Macdonald Growth Copy Share Image
“And when I look again she seems neither bird nor reptile, but a creature shaped by a million years of evolution for… — Helen Macdonald Copy Share Image
“Riding out with the Old Surrey and Burstow Hunt, White recorded the first time he saw a kill with distanced fascination. The… — Helen Macdonald Animals Copy Share Image
“He did all the right things: flew aeroplanes, shot, fished for salmon, hunted; and even better, all the wrong things: kept grass… — Helen Macdonald Copy Share Image
“I couldn't keep the dimensions of my car in my head. Or my own, for I kept having accidents. I cracked cups.… — Helen Macdonald Every night Copy Share Image
“He was a complicated man, and an unhappy one. But he knew also that the world was full of simple miracles.” — Helen Macdonald Miracles Copy Share Image
“It wasn't just that I saw in his book, reflected backwards and dimly, my own retreat into wildness. It was this: of… — Helen Macdonald Books Copy Share Image
“and it was there, standing on the edge of a village playing field, that I gratefully stepped into novicehood again, as if… — Helen Macdonald Life Copy Share Image
“I look. There it is. I feel it. The insistent pull to the heart that the hawk brings, that very old longing… — Helen MacDonald Bereavement Copy Share Image
“History and hawks and hoods and the implications of taking something's sight away to calm it.” — Helen Macdonald History Copy Share Image
“There is a kind of coldness that allows interrogators to put cloth over the mouths of men and pour water into their… — Helen Macdonald Copy Share Image
“Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by… — Helen Macdonald Climate change Copy Share Image
“Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived when grief… — Helen Macdonald Children Copy Share Image
“We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives… — Helen Macdonald Life Copy Share Image
“Trained hawks have a peculiar ability to conjure history because they are in a sense immortal. While individual hawks of different species… — Helen Macdonald History Copy Share Image
“White, caught up in this conservative, antiquarian mood, walked with his hawk and wrote of ghosts, of starry Orion naked and resplendent… — Helen Macdonald Time Copy Share Image
“My vision blurs. We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of… — Helen Macdonald Dreams Copy Share Image
