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Ring of Bright Water (Ring of Bright Water, #1) QUOTES

Ring of Bright Water (Ring of Bright Water, #1) QUOTES

1 " I have more than once tried to analyse this apparently deliberate form of self-torture that seems common to so many people in face of the extinction of a valued life, human or animal, and it springs, I think, from a negation of death, as if by summoning and arranging these subjective images one were in some way cheating the objective fact. It is, I believe, an entirely instinctive process, and the distress it brings with it is an incidental, a by-product, rather than a masochistic end. "

― Gavin Maxwell , Ring of Bright Water (Ring of Bright Water, #1)

2 " We have long laboured under an obtuse presupposition that the senses by which other living creatures perceive their world must to a great extent resemble our own; but in fact we are, by scientific invention, only now beginning to approach methods of perception that the whales have always owned as their birthright. "

― Gavin Maxwell , Ring of Bright Water (Ring of Bright Water, #1)

3 " There is something deeply awe-inspiring about the sight of any living creatures in incomputable numbers; it stirs, perhaps, some atavistic chord whose note belongs more properly to the distant days when we were a true part of the animal ecology; when the sight of another species in unthinkable hosts brought fears or hopes no longer applicable. "

― Gavin Maxwell , Ring of Bright Water (Ring of Bright Water, #1)

4 " Symbols, for me and for many, of freedom, whether it be from the prison of over-dense communities and the close confines of human relationships, from the less complex incarceration of office walls and hours, or simply freedom from the prison of adult life and an escape into the forgotten world of childhood, of the individual or the race. For I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it. "

― Gavin Maxwell , Ring of Bright Water (Ring of Bright Water, #1)

5 " Hi - I wonder whether you may be able to help me, I am searching for a quotation for which I have been asked to produce a painting for. The quotation (I was told) came from Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell and was very apt for the painting, it described a flight of Whooper swans flying home against a stormy sky. I have searched in vain for my own copy of ROB (since we moved house it has not yet been found), and online for the quote. But to no avail. "

― Gavin Maxwell , Ring of Bright Water (Ring of Bright Water, #1)

6 " I had been working hard at my book; it was one of those rare days of authorship when everything seemed to go right; the words flowed unbidden from my pen, and the time had passed unheeded, so that it was a shock to realise that I had been writing for some six hours. "

― Gavin Maxwell , Ring of Bright Water (Ring of Bright Water, #1)

7 " When one is much alone one’s vision becomes more extensive; from the tide-wrack rubbish-heap of small bones and dry, crumpled wings, relics of lesser lives, rise images the brighter for being unconfined by the physical eye. From some feathered mummy, stained and thin, soars the spinning lapwing in the white March morning; in the surface crust of rotting weed, where the foot explodes a whirring puff of flies, the withered fins and scales hold still, intrinsically, the sway and dart of glittering shoals among the tide-swung sea-tangle; smothered by the mad parabolic energy of leaping sand-hoppers the broken antlers of a stag re-form and move again high in the bare, stony corries and the October moonlight. "

― Gavin Maxwell , Ring of Bright Water (Ring of Bright Water, #1)