“I have always longed to be 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 town a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.”
― J.A. Baker, quote from The Peregrine
“Cold air rises from the ground as the sun goes down. The eye-burning clarity of the light intensifies. The southern rim of the sky glows to a deeper blue, to pale violet, to purple, then thins to grey. Slowly the wind falls, and the still air begins to freeze. The solid eastern ridge is black; it has a bloom on it like the dust on the skin of a grape. The west flares briefly. The long, cold amber of the afterglow casts clear black lunar shadows. There is an animal mystery in the light that sets upon the fields like a frozen muscle that will flex and wake at sunrise.”
― J.A. Baker, quote from The Peregrine
“Approach him across open ground with a steady unfaltering movement. Let your shape grow in size but do not alter its outline. Never hide yourself unless concealment is complete. Be alone. Shun the furtive oddity of man, cringe from the hostile eyes of farms. Learn to fear. To share fear is the greatest bond of all. The hunter must become the thing he hunts.”
― J.A. Baker, quote from The Peregrine
“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, resting now on the soft flaccid bulk of his prey, there was the rip and tear of choking feathers, and hot blood dripping from the hook of the beak, and rage dying slowly to a small hard core within.
And for the watcher, sheltered for centuries from such hunger and such rage, such agony and such fear, there is the memory of that sabring fall from the sky, and the vicarious joy of the guiltless hunter who kills only through his familiar, and wills him to be fed.”
― J.A. Baker, quote from The Peregrine
“When one says ‘ten o’clock’ or ‘three o’clock,’ this is not the grey and shrunken time of towns; it is the memory of a certain fulmination or declension of light that was unique to that time and that place on that day, a memory as vivid to the hunter as burning magnesium.”
― J.A. Baker, quote from The Peregrine
J.A. Baker
Born place: in Essex, England, The United Kingdom
Born date August 6, 1926
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“Am I forgiven yet?” he asked, kissing her back. She snorted. “That wasn’t you making it up to me. That was you using orgasms to soften me up so I’d more easily forgive you. Sometimes I wonder how you live with yourself.” He”
― Suzanne Wright, quote from Blaze
“We have simply not come to grips with the fact that it isn’t hard to live the Christian life. It’s impossible! Only Christ can live it. And that’s why our only hope is to learn that Jesus Christ did not come just to get men out of hell and into heaven; He came to get Himself out of heaven and into men!”
― Bob George, quote from Classic Christianity: Life's Too Short to Miss the Real Thing
“For toil is the great grinding stone to make keen the blade of your spirit. Toil is the ladder by which your putrid flesh ascends into health.”
― Grady Hendrix, quote from Horrorstör
“But if you are a person who needs no one’s approval, you are probably crazy and live alone on an island or the top of a mountain somewhere.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Guest Room
“A certain king had a beautiful garden, and in the garden stood a tree which bore golden apples. These apples were always counted, and about the time when they began to grow ripe it was found that every night one of them was gone. The king became very angry at this, and ordered the gardener to keep watch all night under the tree.”
― Jacob Grimm, quote from Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales
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