Helen Macdonald
Born: 01-01-1970
Helen Macdonald is a British writer, naturalist, and historian known for her award-winning memoir, "H is for Hawk," which intertwines her personal story of grief with the art of falconry. A Cambridge University alumna, she has worked as a professional falconer and contributed to various publications on nature and history. Her profound insights into human-nature relationships have earned her a respected place in contemporary literature.
Book summaries for books written by Helen Macdonald
Quotes
Here's a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It's from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. Deprived. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.
The world was a blur of feathers and quills and wind-blown leaves. I had no idea what was happening. I was suspended, motionless, in a storm of wings.
The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.
The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.
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 realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses.
The hawk on her perch in the sun, warm, at her ease, and a million miles from me.
You can’t understand the present if you can’t understand the past.
I was in a place beyond language. I was not even sure if I was still alive.
The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away. There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future.
The hawk gave me what I wanted. A sense of the extraordinary, a shiver of fierce excitement, the feeling of living more intensely.
The hawk was an arrow shot from the earth. It struck. It caught.
Grief makes a monster out of us sometimes. It is like those floods of spring snow melt that overtake a mountain landscape. You are minding your own business when something breaks loose in the earth, and all of a sudden everything is a rushing, chaotic mess.