Unearthing Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“If he imparted any supportive wisdom that day, it was this: We talk about marriage like it is something winnable, something we can tame into a fixed and faithful orbit, when really it involves a lot of failing and trying again. Marital love is extreme. It’s stamina. A marriage with complications or doubt is not a fiasco. It is a marriage.”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets

“We live in a death-drive culture,” said the graduate student behind me to her seatmate over the tapping of laptop keys. “You can call it capitalism or efficiency but it’s basically a death-drive economy that’s destroying the whole planet.”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets

“When a child is traumatically separated from their parents at a young age, their body releases a flood of stress hormones that kill off neurons and dendrites in the brain, resulting in permanent physical and psychological changes.”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing

“We talk about marriage like it is something winnable, something we can tame into a fixed and faithful orbit, when really it involves a lot of failing and trying again, Marital love is extreme. It's stamina, A marriage with complications or doubt is not a fiasco. It is a marriage.”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing

“What if a woman in a garden is not posing but simply widening and gentling her boundaries? What if she is embracing the sensory experience of being alive and entwined? To live with things growing all around, to be in the center of all this life, is to dream inside the Endless.”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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