Keri Hulme Quotes

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.

I spent a considerable amount of time when I was, o, adolescent, wondering why I was different, whether there were other people like me. Why, when everyone else was fascinated by their developing sexual nature, I couldn't give a damn. I've never been attracted to men. Or women. Or anything else. It's difficult to explain, but while I have an apparently normal female body, I don't have any sexual urge or appetite.

I am not dead yet! I can still call forth a piece of soul and set it down in color, fixed forever.

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

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.

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.

I have a grasshopper and haphazard mind y'know, a brain that listens to all sorts of things as well as itself.

There really is no place like home, even when it's grown a couple of sizes too small...

I am exceedingly angry for no good reason.

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.

But something. Something has died. Isn't there now. I can't paint.' There are tears in her voice but none in her eyes. 'I am dead inside'.

Through poverty, godhunger, the family debacle, I kept a sense of worth. I could limn and paint like no-one else in this human-wounded land: I was worth the while of living. Now my skill is dead. I should be.

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

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

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.

All the land is filled with mysteries, and this place fairly sings with them.

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

I have watched the river and the sea for a lifetime. I have seen rivers rob soil from the roots of trees until the giants came foundering down. I have watched shores slip and perish, the channels silt and change; what was beach become a swamp and a headland tumble into the sea. An island has eroded in silent pain since my boyhood, and reefs have become islands. Yet the old people used to say, People pass away, but not the land. It remains forever. Maybe that is so. The land changes. The land continues. The sea changes. The sea remains.

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.

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.

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