Migrations Quotes
"The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here."
"Once, it was birds who gave birth to a fiercer me."
"The thought of being aboard one of these merciless vessels with people who lay waste to the ocean makes my skin crawl."
"I’ve been pecked on the skull and hands more than a dozen times by birds who have been named the most protective in the sky."
"I start to tremble but keep going, it’s too late now, you have touched her, branded her, pressed your human self upon her. What a hateful thing."
"The sensation is coming back into my limbs and there is an erratic pulse in my veins that I recognize as the marriage between excitement and desperation."
"I was born Franny Stone. My Irish mother gave birth to me in a small Australian town where she’d been left, broke and alone."
"If I were capable of staying any place, it might be here. But the birds won’t stay, and neither will I."
"The rhythms of the sea’s tides are the only things we humans have not yet destroyed."
"The notion of securing a place on a fishing vessel and having its captain carry me as far south as he is able; the idea of following the migration of a bird, the longest natural migration of any living creature."
"To be fair, I left him first, more times than I can count."
"It’s not life I’m tired of, with its astonishing ocean currents and layers of ice and all the delicate feathers that make up a wing. It’s myself."
"To me they were the presence of something profound, though at six I didn’t know what. Something like loneliness, or its opposite."
"They were mine, and I theirs, and we loved each other."
"It’s my method of logging everything: describing the terns to him in great detail."
"I think of the impact of a life like that. It sounds quiet, and so small as to be invisible."
"We are, all of us, given such a brief moment of time together, it hardly seems fair. But it’s precious, and maybe it’s enough, and maybe it’s right that our bodies dissolve into the earth."
"I have to stop it somehow. Of course I can’t stop it."
"‘Be easy,’ Ennis says a while later when the storm has lulled us both into an uneasy stupor. ‘It won’t come to that.’"
"‘You’re Irish!’ ‘A long way back,’ Blue adds."
"‘I’m impressed and envious,’ I tell them, and Hally’s bristling gaze loses some of its suspicion."
"Their soft clucking is almost motherly, and I love it here."
"Life’s always lonely. Less so with the birds. They led me to my husband, once."
"What would possess someone to choose such a lonely life?"
"If I have to give it all up to be there for them, then I will, but I have to end it well. I have to achieve something."
"We don’t sail without each other and that’s it, that’s all there is to it."
"It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay."
"I’m always crying," I say, dashing the tears from my face.
"I am separate, and that might as well be death anyway."
"Life’s always lonely. Less so with the birds."
"There’s a difference between wandering and leaving."
"I’ll love you no matter where on this earth you are."
"I’m sorry. I’ll love you no matter where on this earth you are."
"There’s a difference between wandering and leaving. In truth, you’ve never once left me."
"We can’t come and go from a place like that."
"The wilderness within that demands I survive."
"The less we touch, the better. All our touching does is destroy."
"We can nurture it, too, if we are brave enough."
"We are not here alone, not yet. They haven’t all gone and so there isn’t time for me to drown."
"I won’t promise you anything. I’ve given up on promises. I’ll just show you."
"No one person is ever too small to do their part."