Top 70 Kaui Hemmings Quotes
#1. I can still love feeling so close to the sun and peaks of mountains, still love life at this altitude - it makes me feel like every breath counts.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#2. Hawaii is so complex; there are so many points of view, and there are so many experiences to see and to find.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#3. Do you guys have sunscreen?" I ask.
"No," Scottie says. "Do we have water?"
"Did you bring any?" Alex asks.
"No," I say.
Alex pops her head up. "Did you bring snacks for us?"
"We can walk to town."
How do mothers manage to bring everything a child could need?
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#4. I try to think of it not as writer's block, but a time where you just need to live life and experience things so you have something to write about.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#6. We've visited a lot, but being a visitor is very different from living in Hawaii, especially when you're going to high school.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#7. My seven-year-old daughter knows old songs and how the neighborhoods got their names. There are little things: Businesses receive blessings from Hawaiian priests before opening, and everyone's kids have their debut luau. You can't really get through a day without doing something Hawaiian.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#8. I like to add props to render the specificities of place - paintings, food, clothing, signs, infrastructure, music, sayings and slang particular to the region and particular to the character. And props shouldn't just sit there; they should get used.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#9. When a place comes across vividly in a novel, it's often compared to a character. I can remember writing teachers who encouraged me to treat setting as if it were a character, to give it three dimensions, to make it come alive, jump off the page.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#10. Tragedy brings change, and that's what I'm interested in most - how people plunge into change and try to fight, then eventually move with it with grace.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#11. Two days a week, I go to my office at The Grotto, a writer's collective in San Francisco. I get there at 8:15 and write until around 1 or 2 P.M.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#12. It's useless to criticize things that people love and something that speaks to them.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#16. I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#17. I'd always dread this part of being a guest in the morning - the tentative yielding into the house's normal traffic.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#18. Perhaps I did nothing because I don't have enough fear to be a good parent.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#19. I feel like having details from their day and having a plot and action and things to do is much more revealing than having a character sitting and thinking to themselves. When I'm writing, I want people to actually have a goal, something that's dragging them forward.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#20. Adults appreciate the flavor of wine, its nuances and such. And we have major problems and stress.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#21. Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#22. If Joanie dies before me, I wonder if I'll ever be with another woman. I can't imagine going through all of the preliminary stuff - the talk, the chatter, the dinners. I'd have to take someone places, explain my history, make jokes, dole out compliments, hold back farts.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#23. Where are their mothers? Kids are so free here. It makes them seem older, more capable, coordinated, but wild.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#24. We're just kids growing up on an island, doing bad things in pretty places.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#25. I let her go on with this fantasy, this belief in magical endings, this belief that love can bring someone to life.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#26. I've never gone back to the stacks after my book's expiration at the front of the store. Not because I'm above it or anything, but I'd be mortified if someone caught me looking for my own book.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#27. Setting shouldn't just consist of describing nature or a landscape, or of saying where something takes place. It is the world of specific people. It's not enough for it to feel vivid or credible; it should feel necessary.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#28. I was useless, that I leave my socks hanging on every doorknob in the house.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#30. I can't speak for all Hawaiians, but the reality is that we depend on tourism. Locals might not want to go to the spots like Waikiki, but we do want tourists to experience more of the islands.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#31. I'll never be ready. Yet at the same time, you always want to reach the end. You can't fly to a destination and linger in the air. I want to reach the end of this thing, and I feel terrible about it.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#32. What's great about teen fiction is that it's all mixed up - there's highbrow and lowbrow!
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#33. The beauty of cinema is that it can do some things that novels just can't.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#34. I tell Esther she should ease up on lard. There's no need to mix lard in with Scottie's rice, chicken, and beans. I tell her she hasn't read the blogs. I've read the blogs. I know what Scottie should eat.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#35. Disney's Aulani Resort has really developed the southwest coast of Oahu and led to it getting more attention.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#37. I just try to write what I think would really happen, and with grief and tragedy, there are these naturally occurring moments of levity and humor and absurdity. I think that's what life is really like. Sadness gets interrupted, and happiness gets interrupted.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#38. I don't ask what Alex sees in him because I'm afraid my disapproval will make her latch on to him even more. That's how it works. I'll have to pretend he doesn't bother me and that I don't want to drown him in the bay.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#39. One day during filming, George Clooney was wearing his surf shirt and board shorts, and my six-year-old daughter was in the background as an extra, playing in the sand - playing herself. She and Clooney suddenly looked equally Hawaiian, equally related to the place I call home.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#40. Nothing has changed that much, even during filmmaking for 'The Descendants.' I wrote. I took the kids to school. I cleaned the house. And I had dinner with George Clooney.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#41. Jonathan Franzen seems like the grumpiest guy, and he doesn't seem to like much of anything, so I really don't care what he has to say.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#42. The entire island knows our father, Fred Hemmings, Jr. - kids, adults, surfers, the governor, grocery clerks, gang members who call our house at night and threaten to kill us as soon as they get out of jail. Fred was a world-champion surfer and is now a well-known, controversial politician.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#43. I miss her despite the fact that she envisioned the rest of her life without me.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#44. I tilt my face up and inhale, willing my surroundings to enter me somehow and to remind me how small I am.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#45. Sometimes I loved the disruptive student in class who livened up lectures with wisecracks - it put a spin on things, added flavor, made me laugh. Other times, I wished the heckler would just shut up so I could learn something.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#47. I bet in big cities you can walk down the street scrowling and no one will ask you what's wrong or encourage you to smile, but everyone here has the attitude that we're lucky to live in Hawaii; paradise reigns supreme. I think paradise can go fuck itself.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#48. Fuck', I think. What a beautiful word. If I could say only one thing for the rest of my life, that would be it.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#49. You can't compare and rank heartache. Pain is pain is pain. There is no precise measurement. No quarter cup.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#50. After college, I moved to Breckenridge, Colorado, and went snowboarding every day. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew what I didn't want to do. So I applied to grad school for writing, and I just gave it a shot and took it from there.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#51. People go surfing before work and paddling afterward. My husband is from Wisconsin, and he goes to work in his Hawaiian shirt.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#52. I think grief and fear are going to come to him suddenly. They'll be undiluted and words won't work. We're all going to get hit and won't know how to hit back. I wish I knew the answers, how to help myself and the people who will hurt all around me.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#53. In putting setting to work, I like to think about long shots and close-ups. The long shot is the overall view of the place in which the characters live - the island, the town, the wide sweep of place. Then we narrow in. The close-up, the tight focus, makes the place different from anywhere else.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#54. Get used to it. She'll be there for the rest of your life. She'll be there on birthdays, at Christmastime, when you get your period, when you graduate, have sex, when you marry, have children, when you die. She'll be there and she won't be there.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#55. The sun is getting warmer on my back, and I wish the air could stay the way it was moments before: the air of promise, the elements brewing but not quite cooked.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#56. I lean down so that my face is right in front of hers and whisper, 'He doesn't love you. I love you.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#59. I'm proud of being from Hawaii, and I'm proud of being Hawaiian, but I'm more than that, too.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#60. Why is it so hard to articulate love yet so easy to express disappointment?
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#61. When you're a child, you crave formal recognition; you crave ceremony, celebration, certification of proof.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#62. I picture Cully tromping through that high, deep snow. That's how I feel physically from all of this. Moving through grief like it's a thick drift, exhausting but enlivening. It makes your muscles ache. It makes you feel you've inhabited your body completely.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#63. I'm sorry," I say. "I didn't give you everything you wanted. I wasn't everything you wanted. You were everything I wanted.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#64. Because feeling love does make you feel superior. Until you find out you aren't loved back.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#65. That's how you know you love someone, I guess, when you can't experience anything without wishing the other person were there to see it, too.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#66. I always felt a little bit of an outsider, especially because I grew up on Oahu.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#67. With families, no matter what kind you inherit, at some point you want to announce that you belong to it.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#68. Writing has never been like therapy for me, but blogging comes a little closer - I can smack-talk freely and frequently, and this is good for me.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#69. I love film and have taken a stab at a screenplay. I love writing dialogue and found it highly enjoyable.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#70. The best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
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