“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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“Curiosity is the driving force behind every creative process and it leads to insights.”
― quote from A Curious Mind: Foster Your Creative Potential For Better Life
“...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from The Pit and the Pendulum (University Study Edition)
“He burned with the need to hug her. But since their reconciliation they’d kept each other at arm’s length, as if they were both aware that to step into the murky waters of physical contact would break down the delicate dam they’d created.”
― Carrie Elks, quote from Fix You
“Finally, after several more breathless moments, he straightened, disentangling his limbs from mine. “That’s how you should be kissed. Every single time.” And then he patted my head like a small child and walked away.”
― Rachel Higginson, quote from Bet in the Dark
“Here she was at eight, with the chemistry set she’d begged for at Christmas. Her father was beside her in this one, showing her a picture of the periodic table, explaining how everything on earth, everything in the universe, even—people, starfish, cement, bicycles, and far-off planets—was made up of a combination of these elements. “Isn’t it amazing to think of, Ruthie?” he’d asked. Ruthie had found the idea that we were only a series of neatly constructed puzzle pieces or building blocks vaguely unsettling—even at eight, she wanted there to be more to it than that.”
― Jennifer McMahon, quote from The Winter People
Timeless
One for the Murphys
Prokleta avlija
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