Excavations Quotes

“The first story is told when the item is placed down for the last time—that is the truth. The second story is time. The third story is told when someone finds the item, and that is rarely the truth at all.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“Her fearlessness in the face of authority was the trait she was most proud of. It had gotten her nowhere in life, but she liked it about herself too much to let it go despite mounting evidence that some healthy fear might work wonders for her resume.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“She went on, delivering a condescending lesson on how science works, bitchsplaining archaeology to someone who’d spent two decades in the field.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“The object of her misplaced affection accounted for the lust-vanquishing fart with a giggle and the phrase “Beans, baby!”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“Yo, Elise dawg! Arf, arf!” Every single morning, Ryan greeted her like this as if to coax her into homicide.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“No fewer than three mens’ T-shirts had their sleeves ripped off, revealing an ungodly number of side nipples.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“They were perennially boyfriended women who’d spent thirty-five years apiece working the department store makeup counter, lacquered, dyed, and diet-pilled into anonymity.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“They were excavating an ancient athletic site where the Greeks had once held the Olympics, before the Olympics were at Olympia. It boiled down to a bunch of creepy toga priests blessing teenage athletes, who competed butt-naked, running around the track with everything flopping everywhere, for everyone to see. The local rich people sat higher up on the stands than the poor people, who clapped and yelled and got wasted and ate ancient corndogs and placed bets on whose junk would cross the finish line first. The altar up top was where they burned goats and idols, to favor certain athletes or anyone else so goat-rich that they could just set one on fire for good luck.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“She had to work at her job at the front desk of the Student Health Office, where eye contact went to die,”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“Kara closed her eyes and shook her head, not the kind of emotional moment you want to witness your driver having.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“Being an overenthusiastic, near-violent member of various corporate softball teams gave her the greatest sense of belonging she’d felt in years.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“here once ran the wild bitches, her foremothers.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“And that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? To correct the record, that’s what she was doing. No matter how many years go by—five here, five thousand there—setting the good record straight is the only thing we endless streams of people on planet earth can do for each other.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“pooled in pockets of fat and flesh that hadn’t felt used in years, and her muscles were blissfully sore.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“School might be the only way to tie herself to a mast and ignore the siren songs that soundtracked her life. She felt a surprising flood of gratitude that it was him who heard her say it first.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“True irreverence was hard to find, and it just seemed so obviously practical; it felt like they’d finally met the only other logical person on the planet. They each tethered the other to worlds they were respectively afraid of participating in fully: Elise denied herself friends, Z denied herself mountains.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations

“Her pairings were never quite right, neither comfortable nor exciting enough to inspire her to dig in; she viewed them just as merciful breaks from the relentless current, like a fish latching its suckers onto a whale for the ocean ride.”
― Kate Myers, Excavations