Top 16 Quotes & Sayings by Keri Hulme

Wars of small kingdoms and forgotten lands, what do chessmen dream of in the dark?

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

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.

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

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 dead yet! I can still call forth a piece of soul and set it down in color, fixed forever.

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.

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.

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

It's the possibility that when you're dead you might still go on hurting that bothers me.

I am not a person to say the words out loud I think them strongly, or let them hunger from the page: know it from there, from my silence, from somewhere other than my tongue the quiet love the silent rage.

The company you keep at death is, of all things, most dependent on chance.

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

I am exceedingly angry for no good reason.

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.