Richard Mabey

"The light is extraordinary – luminous, dusty, giving every pale surface the lustre of mother-of-pearl. Mounds of cow parsley and scythed grass glow in the moonbeams like suspended balls of mist."

"Its a thing that happens to living creatures when theyre in trouble, an inward journey. Thats what the shutting down of everything is about. Regarding depression as an enemy is the worst possible thing you can do. It drains it of meaning. It makes it something exterior to yourself."

"I wonder if, in the future, we will regard this insistent urge to use wild beings as “proxies” as a kind of cultural appropriation, and begin to see the living world as a commonwealth, not a colony."

"Finding words to bridge that divide between the otherness of nature – a swift sleeping on the wing 5,000ft up, and the life-choosing immediacy, the intimate familiarity of the rush of wings past the face – is what most nature writers are striving to do, not wallow in some vanished pastoral world."