A Year's Turning Quotes

“When you own the house you live in, and have enough land on which to grow food, what can they do to you, really?”
― Michael Viney, A Year's Turning

“A heron in a high wind ought to be an aerodynamic disaster: five feet of wings and only four pounds of body: how can it possibly mould those turbulent armfuls of air? But then, just as it seems likely to be blown inside out, like an umbrella, its wings find their arc, the neck is tucked in, and the legs trail out as a rudder. Away it goes, out above the bay to Connemara, a flying weather vane with its own, elected south.”
― Michael Viney, A Year's Turning

“David came back from counting with a pleased, proprietorial air - eleven hundred geese so far and probably as many still to come. They were nervous, he said, as if they'd been shot at in Iceland. Released to my own walk, I found all of them crowded together on a headland at the far, southern tip of the island. They got up in an explosion such as I have never seen, a flickering eruption of black and silver between me and the sun. They broke into long chains, and circled away to the northern fields, barking and bugling.
I called out to them: 'You're beautiful!”
― Michael Viney, A Year's Turning

“The stream wants to go down the hill to the sea: would carve for itself, if it could, a dead-straight, U-shaped chute with sides of glass. It is pure, formless energy, pushing and twisting down the path of least resistance.”
― Michael Viney, A Year's Turning

“All his really had less to do with explaining life on earth than with explaining me to my daughter. When I took up a curlew's skull, with the long, curved tweezers of a bill, and used it as a prop for a sermon on adaptation, she had other things to read in my face and voice: why any of it mattered to me, why I cared if she were interested. At twelve and a half, the reason for our change of lifestyle must still have seemed deeply mysterious, a thing of constantly shifting focus and enthusiasm, of unassuagable curiosity and finding-out. This was, if I could communicate it, the state of grace I wanted her to share.”
― Michael Viney, A Year's Turning

“Just for once, just for now, there is a glossy perfection to everything that grows: to the crisp whorls of sweet corn, to the grape-sheen on red cabbage, to the polished green spikes of onions and shallots. You could put them in a gallery, each on its plinth: plants posing as themselves.”
― Michael Viney, A Year's Turning

“The peculiar bevels and bulges which sculpt the head of a hare sweep up to support the twin, twitching columns of its ears. Only at close proximity do you enter the force-field of the animal's ceaseless, neurotic anxiety, the constant radar scan of its fear. Its ears are never still, but swivel their dark tips in infinitesimal and separate adjustments, catching sound like a sail catches wind, every sigh and rustle in that untrustworthy vector of the world directly to the rear.”
― Michael Viney, A Year's Turning

“Think of what it means to doubt the 'naturalness' of weather. We have never been sure what it would do, but we could be fairly sure of what it would not do, on average and over a period. Given a windy winter like this one, we could count on 'fickle' nature not to do it too often or too catastrophically. But supposing we lost that assurance: supposing, after sixteen storms since Christmas, we had no good reason for trusting that there would not be sixty more?”
― Michael Viney, A Year's Turning