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

“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

“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

“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

“Ok. It's possible that birds may sing just for the joy of it.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“We may be captive when we choose financial stability over artistic freedom, when we live our lives like agoraphobics, confusing the safety of a locked house with security. The cage oh habit. The cage of ego. The cage of ambition. The cage of materialism. The line between freedom from fear and freedom from danger is not always easy to discern”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“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

“My close friend was deep in the throes of a book on climate change. She later wrote of hearing 'the great farmer-poet Wendell Berry deliver a lecture on how we each have a duty to love our 'homeplace' more than any other.' When the talk was over, she approached him for guidance. 'I asked him if he had any advice for rootless people like me and my friends, who live in our computers and always seem to be shopping for a home. 'Stop somewhere,' he replied. And begin the thousand-year-long process of knowing that place.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“Our faulty memories and relatively short lifespans have made us unreliable witnesses. We are unable to truly grasp how much of the natural world has been altered and destroyed by our actions because the baseline shifts over time and generations have rendered us blind. Our standards have been lowered almost unnoticeably. What we might regard as pristine nature today is a shadow of what once existed. We can't seem to remember how things used to be.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“Sometimes books have housed me and sometimes they have encased me.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“But it is not glorious lulls that concern me. It is the lulls that have no velocity, that offer no structured reassurance, that bloom unbidden in the middle of nowhere—when the work is done, when children leave, when illness comes, when the mind stalls. One does not ask of a lull: What can you do for me? These lulls do not have the quality of idyllic floatiness we associate with creative loafing, vacations, or leisure time. (If they did, we might fight them less readily and feel less personal distress.) These lulls carry a restive feeling, the throb of being simultaneously too full and too empty. They evoke what Jean Cocteau once described as “the discomfort of infinity.” What if we could imagine a lull as neither fatal nor glorious? What if a lull was just a lull?”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“What he really taught me was that the best teachers are not up on a guru throne, doling out shiny answers. They are there in the muck beside you: stepping forward, falling down, muddling through, deepening and enlivening the questions.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“Art is an entry point for the difficult. The beautiful is a gateway to the urgent.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“I knew birds were not trivial. They were constantly chirping, and what they were saying, or what I heard them say, was: Stand up. Look around. Be in the world.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“There is a wilderness at the edge of all knowledge.
Die knowing something. Die knowing your knowing will be incomplete.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“A spark bird could be as bold as an eagle, as colorful as a warbler, or as ordinary as a sparrow, as long as it triggered the 'awakening' that turned someone into a serious birder. Most birding memoirs begin with a spark bird.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“What happened in those first few months with the musician was a form of shedding. The more I encountered the reality of birds, the more my secondhand impressions of 'birds' began to fall away. When we sat together in a swirl of mist and formless time, when I stopped seeing my idea of trees and started seeing infinite shades of green, when I looked at a swan's back and saw that each feather was an intricate masterpiece of white, when distances collapsed and my own sense of scale diminished, it was a molting.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

“In response to Orwell, Deborah Levy writes: 'Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December.”
― Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation