Hulme Quotes

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

Keri Hulme

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.

T. E. Hulme

#5. All emotions are the ore from which poetry may be sifted.

T. E. Hulme

#6. You must never lose the awareness that in yourself you are nothing, you are only an instrument. An instrument is nothing until it is lifted.

Kathryn Hulme

#7. Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.

T. E. Hulme

#8. Self-evidently, dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking.

Mike Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#10. Her optimism flew high, not only for her eventual cure of which she was sure, but for everything that would happen to her henceforth. That too, she knew was a characteristic of the tubercular - the very quality , in fact, which made them such interesting patients.

Kathryn Hulme

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

Keri Hulme

#15. Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.

T. E. Hulme

#16. Every man must skin his own skunk,

F. Edward Hulme

#17. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.

T. E. Hulme

#18. Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.

T. E. Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#20. The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in ... He has not created something,he has seen something.

T. E. Hulme

#21. Some of these challenges may be foreseable, many of them may not. Some of the risks associated with a rapidly changing climate may be quantifiable, many of them may not. Doing nothing is not an option.

Mike Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#23. 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

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

Keri Hulme

#25. 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

#26. All clear cut ideas turn out to be wrong.

T. E. Hulme

#27. Prose is a museum, where all the old weapons of poetry are kept

T. E. Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#29. 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

#30. Never forget that God tests his real friends more severely than the lukewarm ones.

Kathryn Hulme

#31. 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

#32. Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical and spiritual needs ... We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us.

Mike Hulme

#33. One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions.

T. E. Hulme

#34. In the light of absolute values (religious or ethical) man himself is judged to be limited or imperfect, while he can occasionally accomplish acts which partake of perfection, he, himself can never be perfect.

T. E. Hulme

#35. All conviction - and so, necessarily, conversion - is based on the motor and emotional aspects of the mind.

T. E. Hulme

#36. Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches.

T. E. Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#38. No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.

T. E. Hulme

#39. 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

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

Keri Hulme

#41. It's not a question of doing the best thing for the environment - the best thing for the environment is for people to stop using vast amounts of energy.

Mike Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#43. All national histories are partisan and designed to give us a good conceit of ourselves.

T. E. Hulme

#44. Pure geometrical regularity gives a certain pleasure to men troubled by the obscurity of outside appearance. The geometrical line is something absolutely distinct from the messiness, the confusion, and the accidental details of existing things.

T. E. Hulme

#45. Born with blue spectacles, you would think the world was blue and never be conscious of the existence of the distorting glass.

T. E. Hulme

#46. 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

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

Keri Hulme

#48. The first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse, was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada.

T. E. Hulme

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

Keri Hulme

#50. Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing, but a compromise- that which is common to you, me, and everybody.

Thomas Hulme

#51. 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

#52. Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities, and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order, then these possibilities will have a chance, and you will get Progress.

T. E. Hulme

#53. 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

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

Keri Hulme

#55. There is no such thing as an absolute truth to be discovered.

T. E. Hulme

#56. 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

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

Keri Hulme

#58. 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

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

Keri Hulme

#60. Poverty, chastity, and obedience are extremely difficult. But there are always the graces if you will pray for them.

Kathryn Hulme