27 quotes found
Writer · British
British writer
“What makes you a chaffinch?”
“Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.”
“On the way home I felt a great and simple sadness. I missed my dad. I missed him very much.”
“The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater. Things sat in it, dark and very still.”
“Being a novice is safe. 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...”
“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 ...”
“When I was an undergraduate we were told that history had ended, and we all believed it. When the Berlin Wall fell, what history was made of was over. No more Cold War. No more wars. And yet here i...”
“On the Ridgeway path, aged nine or ten, was where for the first time I realized the power a person might feel by aligning themselves to deep history. Only much later did I understand these intimati...”
“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...”
“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...”
“Gos was still out there in the forest, the dark forest to which all things lost must go. I'd wanted to slip across the borders of this world into that wood and bring back the hawk White lost. Some ...”
“...that when you wanted to see something very badly,sometimes you had to stay still,stay in the same place, remember how much you wanted to see it,and be patient.If you want to see hawks you have t...”
“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 held the cardboard and felt its scissor-cut edge. And for the first time I understood the shape of my grief. I could feel exactly how big it was. It was the strangest feeling, like holding someth...”
“In two months, I think, my college job will end. In two months I will have no office, no college, no salary, no home. Everything will be different. But, I think, everything already is. When Alice d...”
“All of those thousands upon thousands of photographs my father had taken. Think of them instead. Each one a record, a testament, a bulwark against forgetting, against nothingness, against death. Lo...”
