Utter, Earth Quotes

“Perhaps burdened with the weight of what we have wrought, human beings have remained hauntable beings; and being hauntable means that we are still capable of turning our gaze, of looking up from our narrow preoccupations to be startled by the sight of a broader, vaster community. In so doing, we can come to realize a world that lies beyond us and use, and so come to see both the obvious and the obscure, the fleeting and the eternal, as elements beyond all reckoning of wealth and worth. Sometimes we can still see what is plain to see.”
― Isaac Yuen, Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World

“What are we talking about when we talk about heart? As it may prove to be for coral polyps and tube sponges, the heart we obsess over in so many of our stories and sagas is not a mere pump or knot of muscle, but rather a core essence from which some cadence of being arises, thrums of ongoings that comprise the fierce living on this planet, this rock—itself a larger venture in the shaping of patterns into a strand of music three-plus billion years in the making, played out against the backdrop of an older community that may or may not be listening, a universal commonwealth from which Mystery with a capital M resides, even as it rises and falls to its own incalculable rhythm—all of which are very much beyond the scope of this guide.”
― Isaac Yuen, Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World

“Perhaps what we truly crave lies in the act of encircling, to orbit one another around an unspoken center, apart but never parting, never fully merging so we can be constant in our yearning, to touch, to commune, as points of a constellation-in-making.”
― Isaac Yuen, Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World

“Of course, better than being named by another is to discover a name for yourself, to attain that long-sought, hard-fought description that captures the essence of your being, the one that might not be so much spoken as made manifest.”
― Isaac Yuen, Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World