Khadijah Ah

“I wanted John fowles’s woods knowledge: a kind of wandering wood acquaintance, and no more; a dilettante’s, not a virtuoso’s; always the green chaos rather than the printed map.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“The sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism. And delightful as cynicism is from its intellectual side...it never can be be more than the perfect philosophy for a man who has no soul. It has its social value; and to an artist all modes of expression are interesting, but in itself it is a poor affair, for to the true cynic nothing is ever revealed.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings

“When they join a swirl of birds... they don’t proclaim their individuality or try to make a splash. They dissolve into the group. I wondered if this merging felt so relaxing because it was an antidote to the artist ego, built on an endless need to individuate, to be your own you. In a place of exhausting self-assertion, the relief of disappearing into the crowd.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“I never tire of watching tree crowns move back and forth. I can see both the movement of the whole community and the movements of individual trees.”
― Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World