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Kyo Maclear QUOTES

Kyo Maclear QUOTES

1 " If I were flying, I would travel to a perfect place. A place with frosted cakes and beautiful flowers and excellent trees to climb and absolutely no doldrums. "

― Kyo Maclear , Virginia Wolf

2 " How do you survive the survivor? "

― Kyo Maclear , Stray Love

3 " It occurs to me that if I don’t sort myself out soon I will die of meaninglessness. That is the price of avoiding the things I find troubling. "

― Kyo Maclear , Stray Love

4 " I am reminded of yet one more reason why I avoid children, why I have remained intentionally childless. Children make ruthless biographers and terrifying judges. "

― Kyo Maclear , Stray Love

5 " I like smallness. I like the perverse audacity of someone aiming tiny. "

― Kyo Maclear , Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

6 " If you pour everything into the tiny vessel of a song and wear out your heart, what is that? Is that small or big? If you choose to put yourself out there on a small stage, singing for the small somebody inside of you, knowing how quickly songs wane, is that modest or gargantuan? "

― Kyo Maclear , Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

7 " His approach, enjoying small spots of nature every day rather than epic versions of wilderness and escape, made sense to me. Big trips were the glaciers, cruise ships to Madagascar, the Verdon Gorge, the Cliffs of Moher, walking on the moon. Small trips were city parks with abraded grass, the occasional foray to the lake woods of Ontario, a dirt pile. Smallness did not dismay me. Big nature travel—with its extreme odysseys and summit-fixated explorers—just seemed so, well, grandiose. The drive to go bigger and farther just one more instance of the overreaching at the heart of Western culture. "

― Kyo Maclear , Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

8 " If I am guilty of hiding among tinier people in a tinier parallel world, it is because I am searching for other models of artistic success. The small is a figure of alternative possibility, proof that no matter how much the market tries to force consensus, there will always be those making art where the market isn’t looking. "

― Kyo Maclear , Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

9 " Ok. It's possible that birds may sing just for the joy of it. "

― Kyo Maclear , Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " How does it happen? At what point is she born, the baffled, wounded adult of tomorrow? Is eleven what we react to for the rest of our lives? "

― Kyo Maclear , Stray Love

15 " 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

16 " The birders I encountered in books and in the world shared little in common except this simple secret: if you listen to birds, every day will have a song in it. "

― Kyo Maclear

17 " 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

18 " If you listen to birds, every day will have a song in it. "

― Kyo Maclear , Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

19 " One day my sister Virginia woke up feeling wolfish. She made wolf SOUNDS and did strange things... "

― Kyo Maclear , Virginia Wolf

20 " 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