Kyo Maclear > Kyo's Quotes

“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

“A mother enters a story. But how does she enter? How does she walk across the pages of a book?”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing

“What is grief, if not the act of persisting and reconstituting oneself? What is its difficulty, if not the pressure to appear, once more, fully formed?”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing

“If we hybrids have a superpower, it is the ability to side-see, to scour the periphery of stories and a heritage industry that view the world too narrowly. We know the world is a continuum of polar things, and the words “my people” and “my roots” can be a carnival of confusion.”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing

“Red trillium, clintonia, trout lily and bellwort— the artist explained that these fragile groupings, some upwards of one hundred years old, had a greater capacity for reproduction and survival than single specimens.”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing

“I wasn’t asking to be admitted to the family. Or was I? I wasn’t kin and he didn’t owe me anything. Or did he? The questions were not just about myself but about all people who are, to a greater or lesser extent, shaky arrivals, showing up unannounced, trying to migrate into a kind of safety or homecoming. Some of us stood outside the door campaigning for admittance, and some of us were thinking It’s a minuscule country, for God’s sake, how many more can we fit? And every one of us was related.”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing

“Stories of maternal secrecy are rare. I wanted to think about my mother’s heart away from the troubling moralism that attached to female promiscuity. I wanted to know more about this heart. Not the trapped heart I knew growing up. The heart that found a lover.”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing

“What is a heart but a broken masterwork pieced together from desire, envy, regret, nostalgia, pity, tenderness and hope? What is a heart but a way of muscling your way onward? What is a heart but a fist?”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing

“Knowledge is a beautiful sideways and sometimes upward spiral, but a tower of appeasement will not feed you. Merit badges will teach compliance with preset paths but will not teach pathfinding.”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing

“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