Richard Mabey

Richard Thomas Mabey (born 20 February, 1941) is a writer and broadcaster, chiefly on the relations between nature and culture.

Quotes

• It's a thing that happens to living creatures when they're in trouble, an inward journey. That's 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.
  • "The hedge kid", Interview by Olivia Laing, The Guardian, 22 December 2007
• 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.
  • The Barley Bird: Notes on the Suffolk Nightingale (2010), quoted in [1]
• 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.
  • "In defence of nature writing", The Guardian, 18 July 2013
• 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.
  • "Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald review: in danger of metaphor fatigue", The Telegraph, 8 September 2020

External links

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