H Is For Hawk Quotes
"Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how."
"Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside."
"Independence – a state of being self-contained – is the only generosity."
"I pounce upon a bird with cruel talons and desperate beak."
"You learn. Today, I thought, not nine years old and not bored, I was patient and the hawks came."
"The disposition of their hawks was peculiar. But it wasn’t unsociable. It was something much stranger."
"The hawk is everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life."
"To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk."
"Everything about the hawk is tuned and turned to hunt and kill."
"The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent."
"She was a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel."
"This hawk can see colours I cannot, right into the ultraviolet spectrum."
"He hears the ticking of a robin somewhere, like falling water. This place is soundly cursed against man, he thinks."
"The smell of mortality. He looks down at the rabbit-cropped turf."
"They would understand my hawk with their eyes, as a farmer understood an elevator. We loved each other."
"The photographs he’d taken were still on the camera they handed to my mother at the hospital."
"I was as close to them as anybody now, close even to Chaucer, ‘with grey goshawk in hond’."
"I remember buddleia, and trackside clinker, and a green gasometer, and Battersea Power Station as the train slowed."
"I stood at the window watching the lights outside, pressing my forehead against the pane to feel the faint ticking of summer rain through glass and bone."
"I am the Fool, I think, dully. I used to be a Research Fellow, a proper academic. Now I am in motley."
"I was not training a hawk because I wished to feel special."
"It is a small step from imagining you are the same as that long-dead falconer to presuming that the land you walk upon has been walked upon by people like you since time immemorial."
"The vast differences between you and that long-dead person are forgotten."
"Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes."
"There’s a hush in my head; it grows louder. ‘I am not a spy,’ I’d told my father. ‘I’m a historian.’"
"I felt laughter rising inside me. I tried to stifle it. It came out as a broken cough."
"Flying a hawk free is always scary. It is where you test these lines."
"I think of the tragedy of White and Gos I think of a small boy back in India standing in front of a wooden play-castle his father has made for his birthday... He is powerless."
"The air is dark and full of water. He is soaked to the skin. Gos is nowhere to be seen."
"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."
"I was a lucky child. Until I saw that pheasant die in a winter hedge, all I knew of death came from books."
"Everything the hawk saw was raw and real and drawn hair-fine, and everything else was dampened to nothing."
"Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human."
"You have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are."
"But the regret wasn’t that I had killed an animal. It was regret for the animal."
"How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss?"
"I had taken flight to a place from which I didn’t want to ever return."
"Outside, winter breathed in. Papery skies. Glittering trees."
"How can I do this? Don’t look at the audience, said a voice inside me."
"The fear vanished in an instant. I couldn’t be scared any more."
"Sun through windows. Things, one after another."
"Bless you, Dad, I thought. I always thought you were a legend."
"Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions."
"The wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing."
"I don’t dream of my father any more; I don’t dream of people at all."
"I am death to community. I am missing the point."
"Collecting things like this, I realized, must have stitched together their broken world of rubble, made sense of a world disordered by war."
"In watching the planes, you fly with them and escape."
"These are records of ordered transcendence. A watcher’s diary."
"It was the strangest feeling, like holding something the size of a mountain in my arms."
"If you want to see something very much, you just have to be patient and wait."
"Spring was coming. And usually I’d rejoice at the curious bluish tint to the air and the lengthening days."
"Mabel’s less willing to tolerate strangers in this fed-up state, but she’s still as tame as a kitten with me."
"I swear to myself, standing there with the book open in my hand, that I will not ever reduce my hawk to a hieroglyph."
"She is not human. Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all."
"The world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might be alive to see them."
"Respect the living, honour the dead. Leave them be."