J.A. Baker Quotes

We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.

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.

Acceptance is easier than resentment and anger. So is forgiveness.

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.

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.

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.

No pain, no death, is more terrible to a wild creature than its fear of man.

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.

For an hour, till greyness covered all, the water shone like milk and mother-of-pearl. The sea breathed quietly, like a sleeping dog.

Blood-red! What a useless adjective that is. Nothing is as beautifully , richly red as flowing blood on snow.It is strange that the eye can love what the mind and body hate.

The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there. Books about birds show pictures of the peregrine, and the text is full of information. Large and isolated in the gleaming whiteness of the page, the hawk stares back at you, bold, statuesque, brightly coloured. But when you have shut the book, you will never see that bird again. Compared with the close and static image, the reality will seem dull and disappointing. The living bird will never be so large, so shiny-bright. It will be deep in landscape, and always sinking farther back, always at the point of being lost. Pictures are waxworks beside the passionate mobility of the living bird.

Whatever is destroyed, the act of destruction does not vary much. Beauty if vapour from the pit of death.