Best 25 quotes of Tracy Guzeman on MyQuotes

Agnete had walked over to one of the taller works, the school of fish, and fingered a small piece of metal slightly darker than the others, its shape not quite symmetrical as the rest of the pieces swimming through the air in swirling, upward drifts. Upon closer scrutiny, Stephen saw she had changed the spacing of this one piece of metal in relation to the others, as well as the weight of it. When the wind blew, it did not move in the same pattern as the rest; instead, it twitched and wavered in a way that suggested it was swimming harder, against the tide, in an effort to catch up. "I'm that fish," she said. "I grew up in this house. It's the only place I've ever lived, and I love it here. But everyone in town knew that Therese, even though she raised me, wasn't my mother. Everyone knew that whoever my father was, he wasn't around. I survived adolescence by convincing myself I didn't care; I told myself being different didn't make me any less." She pulled her hair away from her face, and Stephen was struck by the resemblance to her father. He could feel Bayber's hand, an iron clamp squeezing his wrist. Her father, had he been around, would likely have scared away anyone brave enough to come within five feet of Agnete. "I made this piece because I've always had a feeling of being separated from everyone else, which I was fine with, but at the same time, a fear of being left behind. Does that make sense?" Her explanation resonated with him, though he'd have been hard-pressed to articulate it as clearly. He'd stared at the ground, scowling in concentration, unable to say more than "Yes, I understand what you mean. Maybe I'm that fish, as well." "Then there are two of us. We'll be our own school.

Alice haunted the mossy edge of the woods, lingering in patches of shade. She was waiting to hear his Austin-Healey throttle back when he careened down the utility road separating the state park from the cabins rimming the lake, but only the whistled conversation of buntings echoed in the branches above. The vibrant blue males darted deeper into the trees when she blew her own 'sweet-sweet chew-chew sweet-sweet' up to theirs. Pine seedlings brushed against her pants as she pushed through the understory, their green heads vivid beneath the canopy. She had dressed to fade into the forest; her hair was bundled up under a long-billed cap, her clothes drab and inconspicuous. When at last she heard his car, she crouched behind a clump of birch and made herself as small as possible, settling into a shallow depression of ferns and leaf litter.

Before too much longer I’ll forget her minute imperfections. That’s what you end up missing the most, those little faults. They burrow under your skin. Become endearing in retrospect.

Do not let grief be the only map you carry, lest you lose your way back to happiness.

Facts swooped like swallows, darting across her mind; there was a rush of pride in things still remembered. Singing was limited to the perching birds, the order Passeriformes. Nearly half the birds in the world didn't sing, but they still used sound to communicate- calls as opposed to song. Most birds had between five and fifteen distinct calls in their repertoire; alarm and territorial defense calls, distress calls from juveniles to bring an adult to the rescue, flight calls to keep the flock coordinated, even separate calls for commencing and ending flight. Nest calls. Feeding calls. Pleasure calls. Some chicks used calls to communicate with their mothers while they were still in the egg.

Haven't you ever wanted something you couldn't have?

His days swelled with the monotony of hours, piling up in colossal heaps before and after him, the used the same as the new.

His voice was everything she equated with home.

I might be a fan of Audubon, I suppose." "Ah, birds. I can tell a lot about a person by the type of art they're drawn to. You say Audubon, and I think of someone with a meticulous eye for detail. But that's an easy assumption, isn't it? Not the sort of thing that impresses someone like you much." "Like me?" "Uh-huh. Skeptic." He studied her intently, and she was surprised to find herself unaffected, buffered from his scrutiny by her coat and her mittens, her ugly shoes and her padded socks, her warm cup of coffee and her anonymity. He rubbed his chin with his knuckle. "I would say a person who hangs Audubon on her walls is a person who believes in God, but not necessarily religion. A person who believes in free will, but also in the existence of a natural pecking order, pardon the pun, in all societies. Aware of it, and accepts it. I would say such a person has the capacity to be awed by nature and horrified by it, in equal amounts. A scientist's brain, but an artist's soul. How am I doing?" Alice smiled. "Remarkable." "You're not impressed. I see I'll have to up my game." He looked at her face, her eyes, and she looked back at him blandly, keeping her sharp corners hidden. She had little practice talking to strangers but embraced the thought that she could play the role of anyone she chose, trying on imagined identities to see what fit: businesswoman here for a meeting, opera impresario, wealthy collector, lover en route to a secret assignation. "Hmm," he said, narrowing his eyes while he watched her. "It's not so much an admiration for the artist as it is for the subject matter, correct? What is it about birds? People envy them the ability of flight, of course, but it must be more. Maybe not just their ability to fly, but to fly away 'from', is that it? To leave trouble behind, be free from boundaries, from expectations.

In 1972, Bayber's work underwent another metamorphosis, yet refused to be defined by or adhere to any specific style. Elements of abstract expressionism, modernism, surrealism, and neo-expressionism combine with figurative art to create works which remain wholly original and highly complex, both delighting and terrifying at a subconscious level. There is nothing fragile here, nothing dreamlike. No protections are offered, not for the artist himself and not for those viewing his work. All is called forth in a raw state, human values finessed on the canvas, softened and sharpened, separated and made aggregate. While there are certain motifs in these works- often a suggestion of water, the figure of a bird- and various elements are repeated, aside from an introverted complexity, the context in which they appear is never the same from one piece to the next. What ties these works together is the suggestion of loss, of disappearance, and of longing ( see figs. 87-95)" The figure of a bird. He had forgotten his own writing. Finch took the book back to his desk and pulled a magnifying glass from the top drawer to study the color plates. Thomas had completed six paintings in 1972, four of them after July. In each of those four, Finch managed to find what he had seen long ago, the figure of a bird. Was it Alice, flown away from him?

I’ve found I still serve a purpose. I remind people to pray, to calculate the odds, to thank the fates, the gods, good karma, whatever it was that made this happen to me and not them. I’m in the worst sort of club. The one no one else wants to be in.

I want everyone to stop telling me to lower my expectations.

She'd loved birds long before her physical limitations kept her grounded. She'd found a birding diary of her grandmother's in a trunk in the attic when she was Frankie's age, and when she asked her father about it, he dug through boxes on a shelf high above her head, handing down a small pair of binoculars and some field guides. She'd seen her first prothonotary warbler when she was nine, sitting alone on a tupelo stump in the forest, swatting at mosquitoes targeting the pale skin behind her ears. She glanced up from the book she was reading only to be startled by an unexpected flash of yellow. Holding her breath, she fished for the journal she kept in her pocket, focusing on the spot in the willow where he might be. A breeze stirred the branches, and she saw the brilliant yellow head and underparts standing out like petals of a sunflower against the backdrop of leaves; the under tail, a stark white. His beak was long, pointed and black; his shoulders a mossy green, a blend of the citron yellow of his head and the flat slate of his feathers. He had a black dot of an eye, a bead of jet set in a field of sun. Never had there been anything so perfect. When she blinked he disappeared, the only evidence of his presence a gentle sway of the branch. It was a sort of magic, unveiled to her. He had been hers, even if only for a few seconds. With a stub of pencil- 'always a pencil,' her grandmother had written. 'You can write with a pencil even in the rain'- she noted the date and time, the place and the weather. She made a rough sketch, using shorthand for her notes about the bird's coloring, then raced back to the house, raspberry canes and brambles speckling bloody trails across her legs. In the field guide in the top drawer of her desk, she found him again: prothonotary warbler, 'prothonotary' for the clerks in the Roman Catholic Church who wore robes of a bright yellow. It made absolute sense to her that something so beautiful would be associated with God. After that she spent countless days tromping through the woods, toting the drab knapsack filled with packages of partially crushed saltines, the bottles of juice, the bruised apples and half-melted candy bars, her miniature binoculars slung across one shoulder. She taught herself how to be patient, how to master the boredom that often accompanied careful observation. She taught herself how to look for what didn't want to be seen.

She knew she was delaying the inevitable- trying to locate Agnete's address- but decided to make a list of things to buy first, looking for shops close to the hotel and purposefully ignoring her uncertain finances. She dunked a sopaipilla in her coffee and brushed powdered sugar from her lips, the plate of chile-flecked fried polenta, chorizo, and eggs already finished. It might not have been a vacation, but it felt like one. She was on her own, eating strange foods, planning to spend money she wasn't sure she had, and no one was paying the slightest bit of attention to her. She had fallen down the rabbit hole. It was easiest to come up with ideas for Saisee, whose pride in her cooking shone in everything she concocted, tossing in a pinch of this and a smidgen of that. Alice had even watched her hold crushed spices in the palm of her hand and blow them gently over the pot. 'My momma taught me that. Best way to get flavor to every part of the pot.' For here there would be white posole and blue cornmeal, a collection of chile powders, and piloncillo, the little cones of unrefined Mexican sugars Alice imagined she might use to make caramelized custard.

She pulled off the road when she was halfway there, parking the car in a spot where the grass had turned from supple green to crisp gold. The air in midafternoon was laced with the smell of things gone to ground. Beech leaves curled in on themselves, brushed with the dull finish of autumn; the shadbush blazed scarlet.

She told me she'd chosen something for the headstone, part of a verse from Psalm eighty-four- 'Yea, the sparrow hath found an house.' I never got to see it; the headstone was being engraved." "'And the swallow a nest for herself.' That was one of my mother's favorite psalms," he said.

The estimation of an artist's talent is often based on his ability to render both light and shadow. If you have any choice in the matter, spend your time seeking the former.

The older I get, the less I enjoy the presence of other people.

The train was moving too fast to see much beyond the pines stepping up rock walls, but she knew from memory the bird species that would be endemic. She could picture the colored plates in her textbooks- the greater roadrunner, with its shaggy pompadour crest; the yellow eyes of burrowing owls; the shiny, jet-black plumage of the phainopepla, which gobbled up hundreds of mistletoe berries a day. She'd missed the Festival of the Cranes by only a few weeks. How tempting, to find herself just hours from Bosque del Apache, and the Rio Grande. She imagined lying on her stomach, binoculars trained on the sandhill cranes and snow geese in their winter quarters, watching in wonder the mass morning liftoffs and evening fly-ins. It was an old desire, but even now, though she knew the impossibility of it, it persisted; the world as one giant aviary she ached to see, all of its feathered inhabitants in their natural environment, a thousand times better to hear their cries dampened by verdant jungle foliage or echoed across the wells of canyons than to listen to abbreviated bits of captured songs emanating from a machine.

The two of them had fallen into the habit of bartering knowledge whenever she visited. He schooled her in jazz, in bebop and exotic bossa nova, playing his favorites for her while he painted- Slim Gaillard, Rita Reys, King Pleasure, and Jimmy Giuffre- stabbing the air with his brush when there was a particular passage he wanted her to note. In turn, she showed him the latest additions to her birding diary- her sketches of the short-eared owl and American wigeon, the cedar waxwing and late warblers. She explained how the innocent-looking loggerhead shrike killed its prey by biting it in the back of the neck, severing the spinal cord before impaling the victim on thorns or barbed wire and tearing it apart. "Good grief," he'd said, shuddering. "I'm in the clutches of an avian Vincent Price.

We turned into each other’s best excuse for not doing the things we were afraid of.

When Alice was younger, her father had fashioned a rough mask from evergreen needles and lake grass glued to a rotten shell of pine bark, shed like a skin. He secured it to the end of their canoe with heavy yellow cord, telling Alice their ancient Dutch relatives believed water fairies lived in the figureheads of ships, protecting the vessels and their sailors from all manner of ills- storms, narrow and treacherous passageways, fevers, and bad luck. Kaboutermannekes he called them. If the ship ran aground, or even worse, if it sank, the Kaboutermannekes would guide the seafarers' souls to the Land of the Dead. Without a water fairy to guide him, a sailor's soul would be lost at sea forever.

Why do I seem to have this effect on women? They're around me and they cry.

Why do we lack the capacity to celebrate small bits of perfection? Unless it's obvious on a grand scale, it's not worth acknowledging. I find that extremely tiresome." "Birds are perfect. Yet most people completely overlook them." "Well, if birds are perfect, then you are as well. And I can't imagine anyone failing to notice you, Alice.

You don’t know what it’s like to worry you’ll start to despise the people who help you, the ones you should love, because they’re healthy and you’re not, because they’re kind and you’re this angry, frustrated . . . thing.