Findings Quotes

“We couldn't see the real dark for the metaphorical dark. Because of the metaphorical dark, the death-dark, we were constantly concerned to banish the natural dark.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“Isn't that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“Pity the dark: we're so concerned to overcome and banish it, it's crammed full of all that's devilish, like some grim cupboard under the stair. But dark is good. We are conceived and carried in darkness, are we not?”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“Knowing birds is like being fluent in a foreign language, or adept with a musical instrument.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“Maybe there’s something instinctive in us, that we’re drawn to human habitation and can’t resist a ruin, the way newborn babies respond to a crude drawing of a face. These are the rarities in human history, the places from which we’ve retreated. These once-inhabited places play a different air to the uninhabited; they suggest the lost past, the lost Eden, not the Utopia to come.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“When I want to know a thing, I resort to books and feel strangely exposed without books to fall back on, as though standing on a ledge.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“George Mackay Brown once wrote that ‘the past was a like a great ship that has gone ashore”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“Remember the end of the road is also its beginning.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“…I stopped in the tiny garden that encloses the Tolsta war memorial. The bronze plaque lists too many names for this small place; the same surnames recur over and again. The memorial, in the shape of an open book, also remembers the many soldiers who were returning to Lewis from the Great War, only to be drowned when their ship, the Iolaire, struck rocks outside Stornoway Harbour, which is a difficult one to make sense of.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“I can’t do it!’ I wailed, half in jest.
‘You are doing it.’ he replied.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“It’s poetry’s job, isn’t it, to keep making sense of the world in language, to keep the negotiation going? We can’t relinquish that.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“A friend said to me – we were talking about our stage in life, when we suddenly discover that we are the grown-ups, with children and parents, and even grandparents to tend to, not to mention our pupils, patients or clients or employers – that we spend so much time dealing with it all, there is scarcely time to feel. I walked up the silent road, wondering if I couldn’t reconcile myself again to the idea of the Sabbath, to the day of dreary silence and mutton broth I’d known as a child, if we couldn’t close the shops and still the traffic and institute a modern, churchless day of contemplation and rest; and if it would help at all.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“Coll would be a heavenly place to be a child. There are beaches and boats, everyone knows you, it’s the kind of place you leave the door open. If you’re on the island, it’s know. If you catch the ferry to the mainland, well, that’s known about too. Should you have a mishap and require the air ambulance, a helicopter will have you in a Glasgow hospital in twenty minutes, by which time the island will have learned of your fate. A mere thirteen miles of single-track road separates ‘the unspoiled end’ from ‘God’s own country’. There are local land feuds, a limited supply of fresh water, and no high school. In effect, the children leave home when they are an unfledged eleven, to travel as boarders to the secondary school in Oban. Higher education and jobs take them yet farther afield. It seems a price to pay for an apparently idyllic island life, to lose your children so young.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“[…on a Corncrake call…]
Fairy music is said to do this; to lead a man on in his confusion and drunkenness, to start, then stop, then begin again from another place, ever luring him on. This was not a beautiful music, it has to be said; hardly the art of fairies. Mind you, it could be a goblin carpenter, sawing away at his little workbench, if you’d had a few too many at the island disco and were of a fanciful mind.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“…I grew to appreciate the company of people who listen to the world. They don’t feel the need to talk all the while. They were alert to bird-cries, waves sucking on rocks, a rope frittering against a mast.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“…late the other night, when the kids were asleep and the birds at roost, I made a tour through the Internet’s second-hand bookstores,…”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“Fancy – day after day of summer sunshine, in April. The house grows dusty and neglected because we spend so much time outdoors.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“We look about the world, by the light we have made, and realise it’s all vulnerable, and all worth saving, and no one can do it but us.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“…a short seven miles away is the Neolithic village called Skara Brae. There is preserved a huddle of roofless huts, dug half underground into midden and sand dune. There, you can marvel at the domestic normality, that late Stone Age people had beds and cupboards and neighbours and beads. You can feel both their presence, their day-to-day lives, and their utter absence. It’s a good place to go. It re-calibrates your sense of time.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“No Orkney weather lasts long, and you can see new weather coming a long way off. There are frequent scraps of rainbow. And birds. At any point you can stop walking, or pull over and lower the car window and hear the cries of peewits and tremulous curlews.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings