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Helen Macdonald Quotes

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Famous Helen Macdonald Quotes

“I look. There it is. I feel it. The insistent pull to the heart that the hawk brings, that very old longing of mine to possess the hawk's eye. To live the safe and solitary life; to look down on the world from a height and keep it there. To be the watcher; invulnerable, detached, complete. My eyes fill with water. Here I am, I think. And I do not think I am safe.”

Death Loss Grief Dying Bereavement Hawks H Is For Hawk Falconery Helen Macdonald

Author:Helen Macdonald

“I remembered the man I'd fallen for after my father died. I'd hardly known him, but it didn't matter. I'd recruited him to serve my loss, made him everything I needed.”

Love Loss Grief Sadness Coping Toxic Love

Book:H is for Hawk

Source: H is for Hawk

“Sometimes when light dawns it simply illuminates how dismal circumstances have become.”

Grief Sadness Depression

Book:H is for Hawk

Source: H is for Hawk

“I know now 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.”

Grief Sadness Sorrow Depression Aloneness

Book:H is for Hawk

Source: H is for Hawk

“It was the end of July and I'd convinced myself that I was pretty much back to normal. But the world around me was growing very strange indeed. The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater. Things sat in it, dark and very still. Sometimes I felt I was living in a house at the bottom of the sea. There were imperceptible pressures. Tapping water-pipes. I'd hear myself breathing and jump at the sound. Something else was there, something standing next to me that I couldn't touch or see, a thing a fraction of a millimetre from my skin, something vastly wrong, making infinite the distance between me and all the familiar objects in my house. I ignored it. I'm fine, I told myself. Fine.”

Grief Madness Dissociation

Book:H is for Hawk

Source: H is for Hawk

“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.”

Book:H is for Hawk

Source: H is for Hawk

“I'd thought that to heal my great hurt, I should flee to the wild. It was what people did. The nature books I'd read told me so. So many of them had been quests inspired by grief or sadness. Some had fixed themselves to the stars of elusive animals. Some sought snow geese. Others snow leopards. Others cleaved to the earth, walked trails, mountains, coasts and glens. Some sought wildness at a distance, others close to home... Now I knew this for what it was: a beguiling but dangerous lie. I was furious with myself and my own unconscious certainty that this was the cure I needed. 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.”

Death Nature Loss Grief Healing Sorrow Coping Wild Wildness

Book:H is for Hawk

Source: H is for Hawk

“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, [...]”

Life Growth Loss Grief Acceptance Absence

Book:H is for Hawk

Source: H is for Hawk