Keri Hulme Quotes

#1. 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.

Keri Hulme

#2. If I were you, the operator sounds happy he's not.

Keri Hulme

#3. 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.

Keri Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#6. Betelgeuse, Achenar. Orion. Aquila. Centre the Cross and you have a steady compass. But there's no compass for my ever disoriented soul, only ever beckoning ghost lights. In the one sure direction, to the one sure end.

Keri Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#9. 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.

Keri Hulme

#10. 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.

Keri Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#12. 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'.

Keri Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#14. 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.

Keri Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#16. 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.

Keri Hulme

#17. 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.

Keri Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#19. 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.

Keri Hulme

#20. 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.

Keri Hulme

#21. Or," she looked down into the drink, "I used to. Now it feels like the best part of me has got lost in the way I live.

Keri Hulme

#22. I am exceedingly angry for no good reason.

Keri Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#26. 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.

Keri Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#28. 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.

Keri Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#30. 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.

Keri Hulme