Vesper Flights
Helen Macdonald
Top 10 Best Quotes
“What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has done.”
“The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.”
“There's a special phenomenology to walking in woods in winter.”
“So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it, setting ourselves against it, defining our humanity against it.”
“Literature can teach us the qualitative texture of the world. And we need it to. We need to communicate the value of things, so that more of us might fight to save them.”
“(T)he world is full of people busily making things into how they think the world ought to be, and burning huge parts of it to the ground, utterly and accidentally destroying things in the process without even knowing they are doing so. And that any of us might be doing that without knowing it, any of us, all the time.”
“(N)ot everything fits easily into our systems of classification. The world might be, it turns out, too complicated for us to know.”
“When we meet animals for the first time, we expect them to conform to the stories we've heard about them. But there is always, always a gap. The boar was still a surprise. Animals are.”
“We call them murmurations, but the Danish term, sort sol, is better: black sun.”
“Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference. The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.”
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Book Keywords:
climate-change, revelation, man-vs-nature, world-view, phenomenology, understanding, winter-woods, destruction, beauty, murmurations, labels, complexity, woods, acceptance, compartmentalization, nature, diversity, winter, birds, humankind, humanity, understanding-the-world, classification, animals, nature-quotes, conforming
