Kyo Maclear > Quotes

“It is possible too that I was experiencing something known as "anticipatory grief," the mourning that occurs before a certain loss. Anticipatory. Expectatory. Trepidatory. This grief had a dampness. It did not drench or drown me, but it hung in the air like a pallid cloud, thinning but never entirely vanishing. It followed me wherever I went and gradually I grew used to looking at the world through it.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“I like the idea of songs sung by those without big voices. You know, small birdsongs that rise above the noise of the city.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“If I were flying, I would travel to a perfect place. A place with frosted cakes and beautiful flowers and excellent trees to climb and absolutely no doldrums.”
― Kyo Maclear, Virginia Wolf

“The birders I encountered in books and in the world shared little in common except this simple secret: if you listen to birds, every day will have a song in it.”
― Kyo Maclear

“Or maybe I discovered something more fundamental: worry is a constriction. A mind narrows when it has too much to bear. Art is not born of unwanted constriction. Art wants formless and spacious quiet, anti-social daydreaming, time away from the consumptive volume of everyday life.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“You can make change or it can make YOU. Change is to keep us on our toes. Change is to make us look more closely. What doesn't change are the arms you use to hug with. Those stay the same.”
― Kyo Maclear, Mr. Flux

“If you listen to birds, every day will have a song in it.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“Ok. It's possible that birds may sing just for the joy of it.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“Sometimes we falter not because the ground beneath our feet is unstable but because it's exhausting to keep moving, to keep trying, to keep performing the same actions again and again.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“One day my sister Virginia woke up feeling wolfish. She made wolf SOUNDS and did strange things...”
― Kyo Maclear, Virginia Wolf

“One morning while standing at a café counter staring at the magnificently thick brows of the man making my coffee, I discovered one should not gaze too long at faces unless one is prepared to fall in love again. As I watched the warm air of the coffee machine steam his eyeglasses, as I noticed him squint behind the fog, as he made a flower pattern in the foam of my coffee, I felt overcome with love. Faces have a near-unwatchable intimacy, particularly in a world in which everything perishes in the end. It is difficult to look as we choose, without emotional consequence.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“If the wind is going the right way, some birds like to spread their wings and hang in the air, appearing not to move a bit. It is a subtle skill, to remain appreciably steady amid the forces of drift and gravity, to be neither rising nor falling.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“On the satisfactions of small birds and small art and the audacity of aiming tiny in an age of big ambitions.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“There are moments when what we need, what will benefit us most, is the power to style our own stories.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“Sometimes you have to have the lightest touch to lift a heavy heart, to speak at all.”
― Kyo Maclear, Stray Love

“Now when I hear birdsong, I feel an entry to that understory. When I am feeling too squeezed on the ground, exhausted by everything in my care, I look for a little sky. There are always birds flying back and forth, city birds flitting around our human edges, singing their songs.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“I like smallness. I like the perverse audacity of someone aiming tiny.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“I am reminded of yet one more reason why I avoid children, why I have remained intentionally childless. Children make ruthless biographers and terrifying judges.”
― Kyo Maclear, Stray Love

“Later I will tell him: our courage comes out in different ways. We are brave in our bold dreams but also in our hesitations. We are brave in our willingness to carry on even as our pounding hearts say, “You will fail and land on your face.” Brave in our terrific tolerance for making a hundred mistakes. Day after day. We are brave in our persistence.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“Books have given me great stores of happiness, but if I am honest with myself I can see they have also taken something away. I glimpsed the real world between paragraphs of novels. I traced words when I might have touched the ground...Sometimes books have housed me and sometimes they have encased me.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“When he fell in love with birds and began to photograph them, his anxieties dissipated. The sound of birdsong reminded him to look outwards at the world.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“The fog turned a strange yellow, then orange, then black. The gilded winged statue Victory at Buckingham Palace retreated into mist. St. Paul's was a hazy outline, ghostlike in the gloom. La Traviata at the Sadler's Wells theatre was terminated midway because the audience could no longer see the singers on stage. Pedestrians noticed how everything below the waist disappeared. Knees, shoes, dogs became indistinguishable. The Great Smog was days and nights of people and things passing out of sight and existence. It seemed a fitting time for a mother to evaporate.”
― Kyo Maclear, Stray Love

“It occurs to me that if I don’t sort myself out soon I will die of meaninglessness. That is the price of avoiding the things I find troubling.”
― Kyo Maclear, Stray Love

“What if I stopped fighting for the trance of long-form days, where I would be uninterrupted and ambitiously absorbed in a big project? What if I gave myself over to time's dispersion? Could I value the fractured moments as something more than 'sub-time' or lost time or broken time? Could I find a graceful way to work and be in the world that might still pull me up and forward?”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“But I remember thinking it seemed cruel that a bird should be punished for believing it could fly.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“A veteran reporter knows there is a disconnect between how an event in a region is experienced and the way it is perceived in distant capitals. He sends dispatches about violent insurrections, riots and clashes, and feels his words loom large in his mind, then become small, minuscule, in the sending,until eventually he discovers that none of his reporting produces more than a twinge or yawn in the wider world.”
― Kyo Maclear, Stray Love

“What can you do within these narrow lines and this limited time? Who or what is stopping you?”
― Kyo Maclear

“I could hear her saying: One day I will have a daughter and I will give her an unfinished story and it will be up to her to decide if it is a void or a gift.”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing

“How does it happen? At what point is she born, the baffled, wounded adult of tomorrow? Is eleven what we react to for the rest of our lives?”
― Kyo Maclear, Stray Love

“You would be surprised at how hard it is to be open to new and different good things. Being open to new things that are bad -- disasters, say -- is pretty easy … But new, good things area challenge.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation