The Peregrine Quotes

“Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.”
― J. A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“There is no mysterious essence we can call a 'place'. Place is change. It is motion killed by the mind, and preserved in the amber of memory.”
― J. A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“Whatever is destroyed, the act of destruction does not vary much. Beauty if vapour from the pit of death.”
― J. A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“No pain, no death, is more terrible to a wild creature than its fear of man.”
― J. A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“Binoculars, and a hawk-like vigilance, reduce the disadvantage of myopic human vision.”
― J. A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“It is an effort to descend down the hand-holds of memory to the plain beneath, to recall the lost future, the dusk hovering above the sunken cities, the dim western world of fallen light and broken skies. My life is here, where soon the larks will sing again, and there is a hawk above. One wishes only to go forward, deeper into the summer land, journeying from lark-song to lark-song, passing through the dark realm of the owls, the fox-holdings, the badger-shires, out into the brilliant winter dominion, the sea-bleak world of the hawks.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“It is perhaps the perverse fate of a deeply private person to find that the thing he or she wishes most to withhold or deems least important, becomes the stuff of widest speculation.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“So much apparent cruelty is mercifully concealed from us by the sheltering leaves. We seldom see the bones of pain that hang beyond the green summer day. The woods and fields and gardens are places of endless stabbing, impaling, squashing, and mangling. We see only what floats to the surface: the colour, the song, the nesting, and the feeding. I do not think we could bear a clear vision of the animal world.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“The hawkless valley bloomed with the soft voices of the waking owls.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“This is now a different place from what it was two hours ago. There is no mysterious essence we can call a 'place'. Place is change. It is motion killed by the mind, and preserved in the amber of memory.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“It is a good life, a seal's, here in these shallow waters. Like the lives of so many air and water creatures, it seems a better one than ours. We have no element. Nothing sustains us when we fall.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“I swooped through leicestershires of swift green light. A dazzling wetness of green fields irrigated the windswept eye.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“Bar-tailed godwits flying with curlew, with knot, with plover; seldom alone, seldom settling; snuffling eccentrics; long-nosed, loud-calling sea-rejoicers; their call a snorting, sneezing, mewing, spitting bark. Their thin upcurved bills turn, their heads turn, their shoulders and whole bodies turn, their wings waggle. They flourish their rococo flight above the surging water. Screaming gulls corkscrewing high under cloud. Islands blazing with birds. A peregrine rising and falling. Godwits ricocheting across water, tumbling, towering. A peregrine following, swooping, clutching. Godwit and peregrine darting, dodging; stitching land and water with flickering shuttle. Godwit climbing, dwindling, tiny, gone: peregrine diving, perching, panting, beaten.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“The penumbra of dusk moves slowly westward. The owls of Europe are already hunting. The zoo owls will be waking now as the light declines and the grey Victorian brickwork glows with evening gold. Trees drift in the wind above the roar of traffic in the road outside. White mice lie dead on the floor of the cage. The eagle owl will not feed till dusk. He is waking as the people watch him, stretching his neck and uttering a soft call. His sunset-coloured eyes are kindling, the light coming slowly forward from within. The owl looks outward, beyond the watching faces. They have no significance for him. He is waking to his own world, to glooms of spruce or desert rock. He does not see the dull metallic chains that fence us in. His mind is still unscalable, a crag from which he can look down at the captives gazing up at him.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“The water shines. It has no dimension. I cannot tell whether it is higher or lower than the hill where I am standing. Water, air, and light, float upward together. This is the world of the sky, of the east wind, of the ancestral sea. There is a strange breathlessness in the air. The body is lifted up by the joy of arrival, by the voice of the curlew, by the soaring cries of the gulls. The sky has descended. All things are set apart, made distant. They have a different life, a remoteness they do not possess inland. The sea has risen. Its charismatic glitter towers above.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“A tawny owl beats down the dark ride. Many points of light, visible to him though I cannot see them, gleam in the grass and the bracken like a dew of fallen stars beneath the shadow of his wings. Something shrieks as the owl descends, bringing the endless darkness that follows the shreds of fire. Somewhere a life hangs limp; the still blood, in its continent of fur, hanging from the cold talons that have drawn the last flame. The death of an animal is very quiet, whether it is the slow suffocation of disease or the sudden leap from life of the slain. The owl’s hollow voice floats like a sail in the dark stream of the ride.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“The grey and brown feathers were streaked and mottled with fawn; good camouflage against the bark of trees or the dappled canopy of sunlit leaves. After landing, it crouched slightly forward, stretching its neck and looking around. Its head flicked from side to side quickly and flexibly, darting and jerking. The eyes were large in relation to the slender, rather flattened head. They had small dark pupils surrounded by a wide yellow iris. They were a blazing blankness, an utterly terrifying insanity of searing yellow, raging and seething like sulphurous craters. They seemed to shine in the dimness like jellies of yellow blood.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“Fear releases power. Man might be more tolerable, less fractious and smug, if he had more to fear. I do not mean fear of the intangible, the suffocation of the introvert, but physical fear, cold sweating fear for one’s life, fear of the unseen menacing beast, imminent, bristly, tusked and terrible, ravening for one’s own hot saline blood.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“Autumn rises into the bright sky. Corn is down. Fields shine after harvest. Over orchards smelling of vinegary windfalls, busy with tits and bullfinches, a peregrine glides to a perch in a river-bank alder. River shadows ripple on the spare, haunted face of the hawk in the water. They cross the cold eyes of the watching heron. Sunlight glints. The heron blinds the white river cornea with the spear of his bill. The hawk flies quickly upward to the breaking clouds. Swerving and twisting away from the misty lower air, he rises to the first faint warmth of the sun, feels delicately for winghold on the sheer fall of sky.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“I have always longed to be a part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to the town as a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival. I came late to the love of birds. For years I saw them only as a tremor at the edge of vision. They know suffering and joy in simple states not possible for us. Their lives quicken and warm to a pulse our hearts can never reach. They race to oblivion. They are old before we have finished growing.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“I shall try to make plain the bloodiness of killing. Too often this has been slurred over by those who defend hawks. Flesh-eating man is in no way superior. It is so easy to love the dead. The word ‘predator’ is baggy with misuse. All birds eat living flesh at some time in their lives. Consider the cold-eyed thrush, that springy carnivore of lawns, worm stabber, basher to death of snails. We should not sentimentalise his song, and forget the killing that sustains it.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“There is always a sense of loss, a feeling forgotten. There is nothing else here; no castles, no ancient monuments, no hills like green clouds. It is just a curve of earth, a rawness of winter fields. Dim, flat, desolate lands that cauterise all sorrow.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“And for the partridge there was the sun suddenly shut out, the foul flailing blackness spreading wings above, the roar ceasing, the blazing knives driving in, the terrible white face descending – hooked and masked and horned and staring-eyed. And then the back-breaking agony beginning, and snow scattering from scuffling feet, and snow filling the bill’s wide silent scream, till the merciful needle of the hawk’s beak notched in the straining neck and jerked the shuddering life away. And for the hawk,”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“The unchecked growth of many summers, rising and declining, has lessened the penetration of the light in a way one rarely sees in farmland now. The hazed-over raggedness of sky above these lush, neglected fields gives a sense of mystery, of something rare and wild that has run away to hide, of something infinitely regretful fretting at the edge of the light, like a big moth fumbling at a window. This is a place where the last of the persecuted may for a time find refuge and seclusion. In the amber of the sunlight that lies between the high hedges, there is preserved an air of the past, the presence of an older summer. Under the surface of the visible world I can always hear the soft wolf-stride of the rapacious world beyond.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“The trees did not reflect the sun so much as glow from within, as though their bark was of parchment, a membrane through which a steady flame was shining. They seemed to have their own light, absorbed from the sun, and retained. When I went past at dusk they were still shining with a strange, almost gaseous, incandescence, a reddening luminosity that only faded, and then quite suddenly, when night came, as though the colder air had frozen it away.

The tall pines rose from the heath in complete stillness, unmoved by the wind. The bark of one tree was peeling, and the eye winced from the flayed look it had. Slowly I saw, really saw and did not simply know, that these pines were living things, standing like emaciated horned animals, maned with their dark green or dull blue clusters of narrow leaves. Their deep piny smell was the small of living beings, anchored by their roots, able to move only upward or outward as the sun ordained. They were not dead, but merely prisoners, land-captives, with the sound of the sea in their leaves.

...Nothing disturbed my vision of these ancient Nordic pines, herded together here like the last buffalo, living their own intense life, the slow fire that can never be seen. Cut where you will, you cannot find that flame. It can never be seen, any more than you can see the spirit, or soul, of a man.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“The morning slept like a snake in the unaccustomed warmth.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“Dark against the bright rust of the dead leaves, an unfledged starling lay flabbily upon its back. It was loose-skinned, helpless, and frog-like. Its eyes were closed, but twitching; its whole body twitched, its legs moved feebly, pathetically, feeling for foothold upon the unresisting air. It had probably been dropped there by the jay I had disturbed a few minutes earlier. It is sad to see life ending before it has really begun. So much apparent cruelty is mercifully concealed from us by the sheltering leaves. We seldom see the bones of pain that hang beyond the green summer day. The woods and fields and gardens are places of endless stabbing, impaling, squashing, and mangling. We see only what floats to the surface: the colour, the song, the nesting, and the feeding. I do not think we could bear a clear vision of the animal world.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“Their rapid, shifting, dancing motion had been so deft and graceful that it was difficult to believe that hunger was the cause of it and death the end. The killing that follows the hunting flight of hawks comes with a shocking force, as though the hawk had suddenly gone mad and had killed the thing it loved. The striving of birds to kill, or to save themselves from death, is beautiful to see. The greater the beauty the more terrible the death.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker