Quotes from Keri Hulme

The smarter you are, the more you know, the less reason you have to trust or love or confide.

There is a time, when passing through a light, that you walk in your own shadow.

Why? is the boy's motto, why does, why is, why not? Food, weather, time, fires, sea and season, clothes and cars and people; it's all grist to the mill of why.

But hands are sacred things. Touch is personal, fingers of love, feelers of blind eyes, tongues of those who cannot talk.

I have faced Death. I have been caught in the wild weed tangles of Her hair, seen the gleam of her jade eyes. I will go when it is time - no choice! - but now I want life.

You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they've been read...

I am not a person to say the words out loud / I think them strongly, or let them hunger from the page.

A family can be the bane of one's existence. A family can also be most of the meaning of one's existence. I don't know whether my family is bane or meaning, but they have surely gone away and left a large hole in my heart.

The smarter you are, the more you know, the less reason you have to trust or love or confide.

I know about me. I am the moons sister, a tidal child stranded on land. The sea always in my ear, a surf of eternal discontent in my blood.

But hands are sacred things. Touch is personal, fingers of love, feelers of blind eyes, tongues of those who cannot talk…

I am in limbo, and in limbo there are no races, no prizes, no changes, no chances. There are merely degrees of endurance, and endurance never was my strong point.

They were nothing more than people, by themselves. Even paired, any pairing, they would have been nothing more than people by themselves. But all together, they have become the heart and muscles and mind of something perilous and new, something strange and growing and great. Together, all together, they are the instruments of change.

Why? is the boy's motto, why does, why is, why not? Food, weather, time, fires, sea and season, clothes and cars and people; it's all grist to the mill of why.

The childhood years are the best years of your life… Whoever coined that was an unmitigated fuckwit, a bullshit artist supreme. Life gets better the older you grow, until you grow too old of course.

Oh all the world is a little queer, except thee and me, and sometimes, I wonder about thee.

Sunflowers and seashells and logarithmic spirals (said Kerewin); sweep of galaxies and the singing curve of the universe (said Kerewin); the oscilating wave thrumming in the nothingness of every atom's heart (said Kerewin); did you think I could build a square house? So the round shell house holds them all in its spiralling embrace. Noise and riot, peace and quiet, all is music in this sphere.

Sometimes, the waves grow hushed, but the sea is always there, touching, caressing, eating the earth...

She had debated, in the frivolity of the beginning, whether to build a hole or a tower; a hole, because she was fond of hobbits, or a tower — well, a tower for many reasons, but chiefly because she liked spiral staircases.

A moon shining a broken road oversea; a lone woman naked to her waist waits at the edge of moonlight; a shadow person watching for meaning somewhere.

Between waking and being awake there is a moment full of doubt and dream, when you struggle to remember what the place and when the time and whether you really are. A peevish moment of wonderment as to where the real world lies.

Writing isn't my life…it's a lovely part of my life... but it's not my life. My life is family, friends, fishing, food…things like reading and painting and all the rest of it, and you can't really prioritize when you're involved with family or you're involved in fishing, you can't say, 'Oh, I really should be writing.

The color has faded out of the sky. It is grey, becoming darker as the world turns herself round a little more. The clouds are long and black and ragged, like the wings of stormbattered dragons.

She has this curious heavy grace, like something out of its element making do in a heavier medium. Like she should be living in water.