“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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“Asil has appointed himself my guardian?" asked Charles softly. Asil was overstepping himself.
"He was bored, he told me," said his father. He gave Charles a small smile. "I have given him a job so he doesn’t get bored again.”
― Patricia Briggs, quote from Fair Game
“Don't sprout where you haven't been planted.”
― Julia Stuart, quote from The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise
“The future can not blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past.”
― Susan Cooper, quote from Silver on the Tree
“You do love me, Gilbert? You haven’t said you loved me in so long."
“My dear, I didn’t think you needed words to know that. I can’t live without you.”
― L.M. Montgomery, quote from Anne of Ingleside
“There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from Art and Lies
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