The Yield Quotes

“See, pain travels through our family tree like a songline.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“He was telling her that there was a lot to remembering the past, to having stories, to knowing your history, your childhood, but there is something to forgetting it too...There exists a sort of torture of memory if you let it come, if you invite the past to huddle beside you, comforting like a leech...a footprint in history has a thousand repercussions, that there are a thousand battles being fought every day because people couldn't forget something that happened before they were born. There are few worse things than memory, yet few things better.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“She had thought about how everywhere in that place Romans had written the local people out of their history. She was trying to figure out how people valued a thing, what made something revered while other things were overlooked. Who decided what was out with the old, what had to have a replacement? What traditions stayed and what tools, household items, art, things, evidence of someone, languages, fell away. But when she tried to draw a vague line to the artefacts of Prosperous she was stumped — why the artefacts of Middlesbrough were important and not those from home.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“So, because they say it is urgent, because I've got the church time against me - I'm taking pen to paper to pass on everything that was ever remembered.
All the words I found on the wind.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“Since she was a girl the ache had scratched further inside her, for something complete to rest at her tongue, her throat. The feeling that nothing was ever properly said, that she'd existed in a foreign land of herself.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“She tried to keep herself and her life small and manageable. Much like a poem. The condensing of the wide, unknowable past that runs right up behind them. She doesn’t do that anymore, her life isn’t a poem, she knows it’s a big, big story. Her people go all the way back to the riverbank, and further, after all — the river and what happened at the river was a time traveller, their story has no bounds in time.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“I was born on Ngurambang — can you hear it? — Ngu-ram-bang. If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words. Every person around should learn the word for country in the old language, the first language — because that is the way to all time, to time travel! You can go all the way back.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“Well, Biyaami had emu feet, I don’t know why, they are as good a feet as any. I asked my ancestors and they said, “Little one, what does it matter? Some things just are.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“The evidence of their civilisation, after so many years of farming, was difficult to find on the surface of the land. But they said it was embedded in the language of Albert’s dictionary, that with the Reverend’s list and all the words that Albert wrote, and other old people remembering the words too, that it would now be recognised as a resurrected language, brought back from extinction.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“August wanted to hand the papers back and to tell them everything, draw them close and whisper that their lives had turned out wrong, that she and her family were meant to be powerful, not broken, tell them that something bad happened before any of them was born. Tell them that something was stolen from a place inland, from the five hundred acres where her people lived. She wanted to tell them that the world was all askew and she thought it was because of the artefacts, that she thought they should understand it was all so urgent now, that they knew truths now tell them that she wasn’t extinct, that they didn’t need the exhibition after all.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“The stone, like the North African redware, the bronze saucepan from Italy, the ivory from India, the pottery water containers, the glass bottle in the shape of a West African head, made in Germany, the curator said, or Egypt — it was all a picture, a sculpture — an incidental passage of time, there upon a shelf on the wall. A line of stones that over time had no sure beginning or end to its construction. It was evidence of the other, that it had once been a bustling sort of city in the middle of nowhere, where different cultures came together.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“The story goes that the church brought time to us, and the church, if you let it, will take it away. I’m writing about the other time, though, deep time. This is a big, big story. The big stuff goes forever, time ropes and loops and is never straight, that’s the real story of time.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“After I met my beautiful wife, although beauty was the least of her, strong and fearless was the most of her - well she taught me lots of things.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“She noticed the sky, blue and spotless after the previous night’s flash downpour, as if the clouds had fled, ashamed of having made the farmers leap from beds in the night, into the anxious expanse, crossing their fingers for more.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“Those final stages went on for a couple of days. The soul and the mind are there, but the body can’t do anything else to be with the mind—it’s like he became split. The natural split. At that moment I didn’t want it to end, I just wanted another day, then you want another hour, another minute. It’s all precious in the end! It’s like there are never enough details left. I wanted everything back. Fingerprints, photos, every story, nights that were longer. A right time to die? To be separated? There isn’t, August. It hurts all the time, it hurts to lose someone, doesn’t it?”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“She blew smoke into the hot air, away from the conversation.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“The tractors approached November as if the year were a song, harvest the chorus.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“There are plenty things I haven’t done, and it didn’t make my life any worse.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“He smiled like a question; she returned the smile like an answer.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“He said he wasn’t going to be a star so don’t bother craning your neck.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“Gondis are born on probation, Joey.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“My mummy, she said, 'The Aborigine is a pity, my son.' She said everyone was always insulted by her no matter what she did, so she let herself do the most insulting thing she could think of - take the poison they brought with them and go to town.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield