169 quotes found
"This is where we start. Let it be blank. Blank is different from nothing.”"
"Alas, being a New Zealander is such an exquisite dilemma."
"We bow only to the highest mountain."
"In the small things is the genetic imprint of the larger things... You must reverse the small things as well as the larger things. You must learn to see not just with your eyes but with your heart and intelligence."
"When everybody else is bending with the wind, very few people will lean against it."
"When I began to write in the 1970s there were three women I considered my elders: Katerina Mataira, Arapera Blank and Jacquie Sturm. They were like spinners working on a loom and their great triumph, together with that of Hone Tuwhare and Patricia Grace, was to begin spinning the tradition from which all contemporary Maori writers come."
"When you're sorting yourself out, family are not often the ones you can turn to. They represent the place of departure and not the place of arrival.”"
"Lots of people come just to dance and have a good time. Here you can do anything you want to do, be anyone you want to be. It's called freedom. Be careful, it can be contagious."
"It felt right not to talk. It felt good just to be. Sometimes there was no need to fill the air with words.”"
"I have always loved long journeys. The act of leaving accustomed surroundings is a release from real time, real life. You can place that familiar life on hold, freeze it, secure in the awareness that it will be there waiting for you when you come back. The journey itself becomes an opportunity to explore parallel lives, those other optional lives which have always been there."
"In the old days, in the years that have gone before us, the land and sea felt a great emptiness, a yearning. The mountains were like a stairway to heaven, and the lush green rainforest was a rippling cloak of many colors. The sky was iridescent, swirling with the patterns of wind and clouds; sometimes it reflected the prisms of rainbow or southern aurora. The sea was ever-changing, shimmering and seamless to the sky. This was the well at the bottom of the world, and when you looked into it you felt could see to the end of forever. (beginning)"
"Hui e, haumi e, taiki e. Let it be done."
"Sometimes life has a habit of flooding over you and rushing you along in its overwhelming tide. (p63)"
"He loved them deeply, but sometimes love becomes a power game between the ambitions that parents have for their children and the ambitions that children have for themselves. (p66)"
"The muted thunder boomed underwater like a great door opening far away. Suddenly the sea was filled with awesome singing, a song with eternity in it. (p95)"
"The moon was drenching the sky with loneliness. (p107)"
"He raised his arms as if to claw down the sky upon him. (p133)"
"I think the time was just right for myself and for people like Witi Ihimaera and Hone Tuwhare. The real pioneers were JC Sturm, Rowley Habib, Arapera Blank, Rose Denness and Mason Durie and those writers I had started to see published in the journal of the Māori Affairs Department, Te Ao Hou."
"What use the green river, the gold place, if time and death pinned human in the pocket of my land not rest from taking underground the green all-willowed and white rose and bean flower and morning-mist picnic of song in pepper-pot breast of thrush?"
"From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth."
"The word permanent... had its own kind of revenge on those who misused it, for the Bible said that nothing was permanent and everything came and went."
"It was when I first went to school that I found out that I was a Maori girl... I found that being different meant that I could be blamed..."
"I never found myself in a book. The children I read about lived in other countries, lands of snow and robins. Sometimes they lived in large houses and had nurses and maids to look after them. They did not belong in extended families, did not speak as I spoke. There were malevolent aunts and terrible stepmothers. It was wrong to be poor. If you were poor you usually did some brave deed that made you rich by the end of the story, when you would marry a princess or a prince. Or you died in the snow while selling matches. Maidens and Jesus were fair. No one was brown or black unless there was something wrong with them or they held a lowly position in society."
"Every society has its own stories – old stories, but very importantly, new stories too, that give identity to the self and explain that particular world. If there are no books which tell us about ourselves, but tell us only about others, that makes you invisible in the world of literature. That is dangerous."
"This first part of the story is about two sisters, Ngarua and Maraenohonoho, who quarrelled over a canoe."
"The days before my wedding were full and busy ones but more so for my mother than for any of us. It was summer, with the sun skidding day after day across a flawless ice-blue sky, taking with it all moisture from creeks and pastures, draining the hills and gullies to a sleek ivory. It was the nearest we would get to a white Christmas in these parts."
"The city was a great loom weaving its tangles and tufts of people into haphazard multicoloured fabric."
"Autumn bends the lights of summer and spreads evening skies with reds and golds. These colours are taken up by falling leaves which jiggle at the fingertips of small-handed winds."
"I grew up amid two worlds, having close, continuous and frequent contact with each. These were two different and contrasting spheres that I inhabited, both full of life and vitality: my mother's Pākehā family and my father's Māori whānau. (chapter 2 p18)"
"To get back to writing the 'ordinary lives of ordinary people'. This is what I believed I was doing when I wrote Potiki. Land and language issues are part of everyday life for Māori. On the whole, the novel was well received. It has stood its ground and seen its way into the world. But it rocked the boat at the time. It showed Māori in a positive light, living in a functional community and being preyed upon by evil Pākehā wanting to wrest land from them by lying and cheating. It was regarded as political correctness (of which there was no greater sin) gone haywire. It was a 'minor miracle', a snide reference to miracle plays, angels and devils, where good triumphs over evil. But land protests at the Raglan Golf Course in the 1970s and at Bastion Point in 1977 and 1978 brought the nation's attention to what was happening in the ordinary lives of Māori people all over the country-injustices that had been ongoing for decades, and still continue. (chapter 18 p198)"
"I found this to be a way that works for me--placing myself at the centre, keeping characters and ideas close, and from the centre reaching to the outer circles, in any direction, for what I need in order to bring everything together. (chapter 18, p189)"
"['Reading Readiness'] aligns with the whakatauāki 'A tōna wā ka mōhio.' 'In their own time they will know.' So, whether actual word recognition and textual meaning begins at four, or five, or eight, or later, what does it matter? There's a whole lifetime of reading exploration ahead as long as the interest has been fostered. Building towards that time of readiness, and children being successful in the building, was what mattered. (chapter 17 p180)"
"Who is my audience? My answer to that has to be that I am the first audience. I write for me and I must be the sole judge and take full responsibility for what comes about. The second audience, the one unknown to me, is whoever will read. Once I've finished a book or a story, my job is done. Reviews, analyses, critiques, theses are not written for me. They come after the event. What follows the reading, discussion, dissection, opinion is part of the next life of the book, that is, if it is to have an afterlife. I should say, though, that if Maori readers did not relate to my writing, or if they rejected it, I would not do it. (chapter 18 p200)"
"When I left teaching, I imagined myself spending every possible minute scribbling, or sitting for hours in front of the computer, and for some months this is what I did. But I soon came to realise that, for me, the writing life needs real life and interaction going on. So, though I did spend time writing every day, often long hours on week days, I found myself caught up in the many activities associated with family and community life as well. (chapter 19, p214)"
"It's what I like to do--describe settings and circumstances, create images, and in so doing expose my own emotional responses to time and place. Underlying it, though, is an anxiety, the concern that it could all slip away, or that we could slip away from it; that we who walk the Earth, treading so heavily and selfishly, could be the authors of our own demise. We have to do better. (chapter 27 p297)"
"To be well in spirit is the most important health. [She] was the song of that run-down house. She was its roof, its walls, its windows, its doors. She was its song. To be well in spirit is the most important wellness. To be well in spirit lifts the physical and mental state to an extraordinary level. All are affected by it. Dark thoughts disappear."
"I'm not sure of the reason for it, but during those days of caring for [her], my thoughts would often return to the time of my childhood when I would hear the old people say that we earthlings are related to the stars. The stars are our flesh and blood. I came to understand that this must be true in the deepest sense. We come from the dust of stars. (chapter 27 p213)"
"You and I grew together and we are inside each other's hearts. We don't have to explain. We know. We understand. (Chapter 25 p198)"
"There are reasons we become ill or dispirited. It's what Oriwia was referring to. There's always a cause. Sometimes we bring sickness or punishment upon ourselves through carelessness, distraction, transgression, or failing to dedicate the day or the task. Weak moments may invite wrong forces. Sometimes sickness is caused by a vengeful person such as Oriwia describes. I have seen those affected by the spite of others become ill, go mad, become lame, turn black, drop dead, die slowly. I have seen their children born with ailments and deformities. (Chapter 25 p198)"
"Salt cures. Sea washes. It cleans. Expanse enlivens the spirit, frees the mind."
"there's singing in the mountains, laughter in the trees, dancing in the light of evening fires. There's whispering in hearts and minds and shadows. That's enough for me. (chapter 31 p238)"
"Dear Rimini and Benedict, You didn't deserve ill-humour and rebuff, and I had no right to send you off with empty hearts when all you were asking was to get to know your 'father'. 'Father' is what you said. You probably think I'm still a bit loony. It's probably true. After you'd gone I kept thinking about my war notebooks. Everything I could tell you, more than I could ever tell you about your 'father', is contained in them."
"In a snow-covered field death is contorted, limbs are angled or unjointed, torsos are splayed or crumpled or torn apart. Eyes are the frozen eyes of statues. Men are marble, broken angels. (chapter 12 p98)"
"It's only now that I remember the racket that went on. At the time you become immune to the sounds around you because you're so busy concentrating on where you must go, what you must do to stay alive. There's no room in your head for anything else except your survival. But the roar of guns, the screaming, the din catches up with you eventually. Also the sights that you see affect you more at a later stage than they do at the time. I won't forget men in a row. I won't forget men on fire. I won't forget a tin hat rolling, spinning across the embankment with the head of a man inside. Sounds and sights wait inside you, along with the stink of smoke, gunpowder, mud and rot and burning flesh. They invade your waking hours as well as your dreams."
"There was once a carver who spent a lifetime with wood, seeking out and exposing the figures that were hidden there. These eccentric or brave, dour, whimsical, crafty, beguiling, tormenting, tormented or loving figures developed first in the forests, in the tree wombs, but depended on the master with his karakia and his tools, his mind and his heart, his breath and his strangeness to bring them to other birth. The tree, after a lifetime of fruiting, has, after its first death, a further fruiting at the hands of a master. This does not mean that the man is master of the tree. Nor is he master of what eventually comes from his hands. He is master only of the skills that bring forward what was already waiting in the womb that is a tree - a tree that may have spent further time as a house or classroom, or a bridge or pier. Or further time could have been spent floating on the sea or river, or sucked into a swamp, or stopping a bank, or sprawled on a beach bleaching among the sand, stones and sun. It is as though a child brings about the birth of a parent because that which comes from under the master's hand is older than he is, is already ancient. (beginning of Prologue)"
"The shore is a place without seed, without nourishment, a scavenged death place. It is the wasteland, too salt for growth, where the sea puts up its dead. Shored seaweed does not take root but dries and piles, its pods splitting in the sun, while bleached land plants crack and turn to bone. Yet because of being a nothing, a neutral place - not land, not sea - there is freedom on the shore, and rest. There is freedom to search the nothing, the weed pile, the old wood, the empty shell, the fish skull, searching for the speck, the beginning - or the end that is the beginning. Hope and desire can rest there, thoughts and feelings can shift with sand grains being sifted by the water and the wind. I put my bag down there one evening and rested, leaving a way for the nothing, the nothing that can become a pin-prick, a stirring. I took warm clothing from my bag and waited through the night for the morning that would become a new beginning. (Roimata, chapter 1 p18)"
"Only [he] could secure me, he being as rooted to the earth as a tree is. Only he could free me from raging forever between earth and sky - which is a predicament of great loneliness and loss. (Roimata, chapter 3 p23)"
"I had other stories too, known stories from before life and death and remembering, from before the time of the woman lonely in the moon. Given stories. But before life and death and remembering' is only what I had always thought. It was a new discovery to find that these stories were, after all, about our own lives, were not distant, that there was no past or future, that all time is a now-time, centred in the being. It was a new realisation that the centred being in this now-time simply reaches out in any direction towards the outer circles, these outer circles being named 'past' and 'future' only for our convenience. The being reaches out to grasp those adornments that become part of the self. So the 'now' is a giving and a receiving between the inner and the outer reaches, but the enormous difficulty is to achieve refinement in reciprocity, because the wheel, the spiral, is balanced so exquisitely. These are the things I came to realise as we told and retold our own-centre stories. (Roimata, chapter 5 p39)"
"although the stories all had different voices, and came from different times and places and understandings, though some were shown, enacted or written rather than told, each one was like a puzzle piece which tongued or grooved neatly to another. And this train of stories defined our lives, curving out from points on the spiral in ever-widening circles from which neither beginnings nor endings could be defined. (Roimata, chapter 5 p41)"
"'Nothing wrong with money as long as we remember it's food not God. You eat it, not worship it...' (chapter 13 p94)"
"We could not afford books so we made our own. In this way we were able to find ourselves in book It is rare for us to find ourselves in books, but in our own books we were able to find and define our lives. But our main book was the wharenui which is itself a story, a history, a gallery, a study, a design structure and a conga. And we are part of that book along with family past and family yet to come. The land and the sea and the shores are a book too, and we found ourselves there. They were our science and our sustenance. And they are our own universe about which there are stories of great deeds and relationships and mage and imaginings, love and terror, heroes heroines, villas and fools. Enough for a lifetime of selling. (Roimata, ch23 p104)"
"The stories had changed. It was as [he] had said, the stories had changed. And our lives had changed. We were living under the machines, and under a changing landscape, which can change you, shift the insides of you. (Roimata, ch23 p151)"
"She did not agree with our acceptance of a situation, which was not a deep-down acceptance, but only a waiting one. She saw the strength of a bending branch to be not in its resilience, but in its ability to spring back and strike. (Roimata, chapter 23 p152)"
"The hills did not belong to us any more. At the same time we could not help but remember that land does not belong to people, but that people belong to the land. We could not forget that it was land who, in the beginning, held the secret, who contained our very beginnings within herself. It was land that held the seed and who kept the root hidden for a time when it would be needed. We turned our eyes away from what was happening to the hills and looked to the soil and to the sea. (Roimata, chapter 16 p110)"
"Everything we need is here, but for some years we had had little contact with other people as we struggled for our lives and our land. It was good now to know new people and to feel their strength. It was good to have new skills and new ideas, and to listen to all the new stories told by all the people who came. It was good to have others to tell our own stories to, and to have them there sharing our land and our lives. Good had followed what was not good, on the circle of our days. (Toko, chapter 21 p145)"
"...gifts are legacies, that once given cannot be taken away. They may pass from hand to hand, but once held they are always yours. The gift we were given is with us still. (Roimata, chapter 25 p159)"
"...the scars will heal as growth returns, because the forest is there always, coiled in the body of the land. (Roimata, chapter 26 p169)"
"She told of gifts that she'd been given, and how gifts once given cannot be taken away and do not change. Gifts did not change even though there could be a shifting in the self caused by pain. (The Stories, chapter 28 p174)"
""People are strength too. Care for people and you are cared for, give strength to people and you are strong. It's land and people that are a person's self, and to give to the land and to give to the people is the best taonga of all. Giving is strength. We've always known it..." (The Stories, chapter 28 p176)"
"The old woman sang of a time gone ahead, and of those already walking ahead of her on the pathways. Her eyes were reddened as though they bled. And her songs, like the pathways, were interweavings of times and places and of all that breathed between earth and sky. And the pathways and the songs went into a time beyond the thumbing down of the eyelids. (The Stories, chapter 28 p180)"
"...the telling was not complete. As the people slept there was one more story to be told, a story not of a beginning or an end, but marking only a position on the spiral. (The Storles, chapter 28 p180)"
"I'd had a glossary in a previous work and then I suddenly thought that a glossary is there for foreign languages, italics are there for foreign languages. I didn't want the Māori language to be treated as a foreign language in its own country."
"I was okay about being Māori. I was okay about being brown, because this had been reinforced positively by my parents and their families. But I always had it in the back of mind, these people don't understand. They don't know. Along with that there was often the assumption that I wasn't clean, I wasn't clever, you know. These were the things that hurt me."
"I had always loved writing, but I didn't kind of know that a writer was something one could aspire to be and that was partly because I'd never read writing by New Zealand writers."
"Though I had always liked books, any books, any written-down words or expressions, the ones I read as a child were always exotic. I never found myself in a book."
"In many stories blackness was equated with evil: devils, witches’ clothes, unlucky cats, bad wolves. New Zealand history was told from a Eurocentric point of view, if it was told at all."
"At the time I gave the paper (1987), New Zealand history was still being evaluated from a Eurocentric viewpoint. It generally glorified the European settler experience and by doing so negated the Māori experience and settlement of Aotearoa. A look at some of the vocabulary in use could be taken as a quick example. Take “pioneer” and “settler”. These referred to British pioneers and settlers. The ancestors of the Māori children sitting in our classrooms were referred to in many less complimentary terms. They were savage barbarians, hostile, cunning. Warlike. Yet the British with all their guns and armoury, sweeping in on many indigenous areas of the world, were never referred to as warlike. In those times, the wars between Māori and Pākehā were still being referred to as “Māori Wars”. A British fighting force was an army. A Māori fighting force was a war party (a term still in use). British fighters were soldiers or colonial forces. Māori fighters were rebels and raiders and warriors (again, still in use). A successful battle by the colonial forces was a victory, by a Māori fighting force a massacre."
"If there are no books which tell us about ourselves, but tell us only about others, that makes you invisible in the world of literature. That is dangerous. If there are books and stories about you but they are ones belonging only to the past, it is as though you do not belong in present society. That is dangerous. If there are books about you but they are negative, demeaning, insensitive and untrue, that is dangerous. Multiply this by what appears on television, in advertising, teacher attitudes, health services, questionnaires, testing and examinations and in many areas of society, maybe we shouldn’t wonder at the low self-esteem, low self-confidence, and therefore the disengagement of many Māori children with education."
"in the early days I didn’t know what real creative writing was. I thought it was just imitating what had been read. I don’t know – trying to write a new Conan Doyle-type mystery, cobblestone streets, or something like that. That was until I came across writing by New Zealand writers, which was very late – after I’d left secondary school. I started to hear the New Zealand voice in literature and to understand that real writing is writing that comes from your self – your dreams, imaginings, emotions, dreads, desires, perceptions – what you know. Part of what you know comes from the research that you do. Those early influences were people like Frank Sargeson and Katherine Mansfield. I started to experience the New Zealand settings, hear the New Zealand voice in what I was reading for the first time, and then when I came across the writing of Amelia Batistich, a New Zealander of Dalmatian origins, I thought well, this is a different New Zealand voice. It started to click with me that I might have my own voice too. The penny dropped rather late for me. As well as Batistich there were all the Maurices [Gee, Shadbolt, Duggan], as well as writers like Dan Davin, Robin Hyde, Ruth Park, Ian Cross, Marilyn Duckworth, Janet Frame. All added to my enlightenment and to the realisation that I would have a voice of my own. I knew also that there were people who I could write about, or characters I could invent, based on people I knew, who hadn’t really been written about before. There were stories about them, but not written ones."
"I have a confidence now that I didn’t have in the early days, when I’d sometimes think ‘This is too terrible. I’m never going to be able to do this.’ I never feel like that now. I know there’s always going to be a way, or that you can just chuck something out if it’s too annoying. That’s a solution as well."
"I wasn’t a very talkative child and I’m not a greatly talkative adult even, but I do enjoy listening to people, and language and how it’s used. It becomes part of my own store."
"That’s what I like to do. I just start out and follow the characters."
"what was the best part of writing. The main thing for me is characters. I don’t really worry about anything else. I don’t think about the storyline too much actually – just the characters and what might happen to them because of who they are and where they are and who they interact with. The settings, the stories, the themes and the voices and everything else, the inter- relationships – all belong to the characters. So if you keep true to those characters and how they might develop because of who they are and who they have around them and, to a degree, what happens to them, then the story will unfold. I’ve learned to have faith that something will come out."
"People need to inhabit the work. I’ve always been interested in writing about those interrelationships – especially the intergenerational ones. It’s a matter of finding ways of doing that which enable different characters to have clear identity. Storytelling is one way I’ve found very useful – having different characters telling about the same things, each one bringing a new aspect and further enlightenment to the accounting."
"I don’t have a sense, when I begin a new work, of standing at the beginning of a long road and looking along it to an end. Instead I have a sense of sitting in the middle of something – like sitting in the centre of a set of circles or a spiral – and reaching out to these outer circles, in any direction, and bringing stuff in. That’s what makes it all closer to me, being in the centre and having all I need within reach around me and piecing it together. So there I am, at the core, with my core idea – the few sentences about the Japanese man – thinking about what I need to bring this character to life and to shift him from A to B."
"When Potiki first came out there was quite a bit of criticism of it. One of the reasons was because of the use of Māori terms and passages in the book; the other was that some people thought I was trying to stir up racial unrest. The book was described as political. I suppose it was but I didn’t realise it. The land issues and language issues were what Māori people lived with every day and still do. It was just everyday life to us, and the ordinary lives of ordinary people was what I wanted to write about, so I didn’t expect the angry reaction from some quarters. But there was one deliberate political act, and that was not to have a glossary for Maori text or to use italics. A glossary and italics were what were used for foreign languages, and I didn’t want Māori to be treated as a foreign language in its own country."
"Learning about each other is not as one-sided as it used to be."
"I’ve always loved the short story form. Short stories are like little gems that you can keep polishing and polishing in your aim for perfection."
"The more I look into these matters the more I think that what happened to the baby happened for the same reason that land is taken, or cultural items, or indigenous knowledge. It's a new area of colonisation."
"Why is it that one set of stories is called "mythology", and another set of stories is called "the truth"?"
"When I get really stuck I want to get back to nothing, to nothing at all, so that I can allow 'something' to come. It's a clearing.... For me te kore is part of the process of writing, of searching, of starting out with nothing and making something of it."
"("have you ever thought of yourself as a member of a corpus of post-colonial writers?") I try to keep away from that sort of vocabulary and theorising. I'm aware of my work being classified, but don't want to be influenced in any way by those classifications — or by reviews or analyses. I need to keep myself as free as I can from commentary. I have to judge my own work for myself, do things my own way, make my own choices and decisions. I must own what I do. Once a work has been published it's been given. It's gone."
"I'm not against research of any sort. I fully understand the importance of research. But I'm against theft. I'm against appropriation — where those who are powerful use their power to take from those who have less power, and then rationalise this by saying that what they are doing is for the greater good; or that those less powerful people will benefit. They never do. It's about sovereignty. There is nothing wrong with one group giving to another because they have absolute understanding of all aspects of what is going on and want it equally as much for the same reasons. It needs to be a giving, not a taking. And research needs to be done primarily to benefit those about whom research is being done — who need to have the say, the power, the knowledge, the 'sovereignty' regarding the project."
"my books are a giving — the first act in communication. Once the book is out there I've done my bit. It's gone. Anything that happens to the book after that is out of my hands, and I've consented to that. Whatever way the book is taken up afterwards is all to do with the next stage of the communication. Reading, reviewing, study, dissection, and commentary are all the business and work of other people — they're all part of discussion. It may all be part of promotion and distribution as well. In other words, if the book is well received then that is encouraging to me. I benefit. I put the book out there to be read and discussed — but if I put it out there and it heads for oblivion, so be it."
"To me, 'sovereignty ' means having authority over one's own life and culture. It is a right and something that should not have to be fought for. Terms such as 'self-determination' are not high enough, not good enough terms for this"
"'Decolonisation' is what needs to happen in the minds and understandings of everyone, including Maori, so that issues can be properly addressed and equity brought about. There can't be equality, no matter how many catch-up policies are instigated, until the issues of racism and decolonisation are addressed."
"We don't live in a vacuum, we don't just stay in a little antiseptic spot with nothing happening; there is something happening around us and inside us all the time."
"my aim is not to repeat. I always want to look for something new to attempt."
"It's as though the pushing outward allows understanding to drop down-as though you've given words, ideas, sometimes conventions, a really good shake. Then you look to see what's happened. (Interviewer: How do you push the edges, as you put it? Do you do it through language?) PG Through using language in some different way, through trying different structures, through experimenting and trying to break the rules."
"(What would you say is the main motivating factor that keeps you writing?) PG: I keep wanting to explore, that's probably my main motivation. I want to go where the writing leads me and find out how I'm going to be able to put across what I want to say. I'm looking for new things to do all the time, new ways of reaching out."
"I think that with writing, every experience is important; everything that happens around us or near us or inside us, or that is part of ourselves. When people ask me where ideas come from, I say they come from my own background and my own experience. That experience and background includes everything that happens - what people say and do, and how they say and do it. It includes dreams and imaginings, thoughts and hopes, and desires and disappointments."
"Patricia Grace's writing is as delicate as Japanese brushwork, yet as poignant and throat-aching as the loss of a loved one."
"Grace's stories make a shining and enduring place formed of the brilliant weave of Maori oral storytelling and contained within the shape of contemporary Western forms. We are welcomed in, and when we get up to leave, we have been well fed, we have made friends and family, and we are bound to understanding and knowledge of one another."
"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. (from the Prologue, p4)"
"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. (chapter 1)"
"Hands are sacred things. Touch is personal, fingers of love, feelers of blind eyes, tongues of those who cannot talk. (chapter 2, p71)"
"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. (chapter 3, p94)"
"Sometimes, the waves grow hushed, but the sea is always there, touching, caressing, eating the earth.... (chapter 6, p249)"
"Keri Hulme, tena koe, whanaunga o roto o Ngai-Tahu, o Ngati-Mamoe! You have the nerve to leave the reader with the heart-ache of responding to the crying of many aching bones! What a dilemma! Ah! But what a wonderful piece of art you have created!"
"Years ago, an enthusiastic Australian critic tried to tell me how he felt on first reading Patrick White’s The Tree of Man. “He gave us ourselves!” he exclaimed. I now understand what he meant. Keri Hulme has given us – us."
"I have to thank a writer friend called Kerry Donovan Brown. I was trying to create this world from top principles, based on what worked for the story. They helped me with this idea of going back. There’s a point in evolution where we went from one-celled amoeba that kind of just floated around doing our own thing to growing a mouth and becoming predatory. What Kerry helped me do was go right back to that moment and imagine a world where a species never became predatory. I needed to find all these solutions to invasion, to eating. I needed to find solutions that weren’t hunting or soldiering or defending physically."
"I did a workshop with Jordy Rosenberg maybe five years ago, and he was talking about this idea that a work of fiction can have a thesis statement, just like an essay, but it isn’t necessarily interested in answering that thesis statement. That helped me heaps. I write to try to understand things that confuse me. The form emerges as I try to answer questions. The shape of a book also comes from problem solving and constraint. You make one decision and that cuts off twenty decisions and you’re stuck with two decisions, that kind of thing. And life too. The body that I’m in and the life that I’ve lived lead me to write this particular book in this particular way. That’s why it’s so important to live around the writing. I need to be in political action, I need to be in family action. These things lead to structure. And sometimes it comes really late. With Audition, it was drafts and drafts and drafts."
"My first book came out fifteen years ago, and it was a very different world. In those days, I felt I had to be cool and calm and detached. (And when I say cool, I mean in temperament, not in, eh, Fonzie.) I read mainly detached, kind of cool writers. The opposite of who I am. You can probably tell, I talk too much, I’m angry, I’m messy as far as emotions go. But I was trying to be that calm person when I wrote. I still feel that pressure now. But the thing is that, while I spend my time writing, no one’s waiting for it. It takes a lot of sacrifice from my family. I need a lot of support from my friends. So I want it to count. Not that purely escapist work isn’t important because I think it is, but there are issues I’m interested in. We have a terrible government here in New Zealand at the moment, lots of unemployment, high levels of unhoused people, incredible poverty. And they keep telling us not to get upset. There’s pressure from all directions to be “reasonable.” At events where people might’ve spoken out, everyone’s being a little bit calmer. It worries me a lot."
"I live in Aotearoa/New Zealand as Pākehā, Tangata Tiriti, which means I’m part of the colonizing group. A massive part of living here is working out how to be the best guest, and how to be aware of the harm that I do just by being here. In Audition, tied into questions about the carceral system are questions of land back. We’re pretty much all living on stolen land in New Zealand and that makes a major difference to me as a writer. If I write, how much space do I take up or how little space should I take up? But the amazing thing about living in New Zealand is that if I can widen my understanding to Te Ao Māori, the indigenous world of this country, this is a place where land is a relative of the people. Rivers are citizens. There is a way of thinking about relationships outside of the transactional, imagining work as relational. A writer’s relationship to the land that they’re on is huge. The places that we walk make up a kind of psychic map in our heads. It’s absolutely inseparable from the work."
"Work is the most interesting thing to me. I’m the first person in my family to go to university, and work was always the way you showed your worth. My dad, until recently, asked why I don’t go back to hairdressing. It’s the best job I’ve ever had. It was a way to be with people, to hear conversation, to see things. This is what I love about work: we’re suddenly put in relation to people that we wouldn’t seek out. We have these personas that we put on. It’s such a rich space. I feel a bit self-conscious that I’ve cycled through so many jobs, but it’s the nature of being an artist and working. It’s difficult to find a job you can put everything into and still have time and energy for writing. There always comes a point in the day job where they’re saying, don’t you want to do more? and I’m like, No, not really. When I first started working, which is a hell of a long time ago, there wasn’t this thing about passion. You didn’t have to be enthusiastic about doing your job, you were just there to do it. And that’s why I love the trades; I feel a sense of accomplishment. You do a haircut and there’s a haircut."
"One of my friends, the writer Laurence Fearnley, got me in the habit of writing 500 words a day, which works for a first draft. I’ve also done things like book myself cheap motel room down the road so I have 24 hours to write. Another friend, the writer and photographer Anna Sanderson, says everything is art, and I really like that. Whether I’m washing the dishes or yelling at a protest—it all feeds the work. There are different ways of composing. When my son was young, I would put on a character and go for a walk with him and be like, Oh, what would the character think of that tree? But I don’t want to make out like balancing work and writing is easy. It’s the hardest thing. And as work becomes more precarious and funding becomes less, we’ll end up with this weird class thing where the only people who can write are the people who can afford to write."
"My writing is always autobiographical. I live in a body that I don’t understand. I have a lot of trouble moving through the world for all sorts of reasons that are inside my skin and inside my brain. But I’m not a life writer. I can’t write essays; I’m not good at them. I also spent a lot of years in the wilderness of alcoholism and drug addiction and hurt a lot of people. Part of my amends is to not hurt them further by glorifying my life, saying, “Yeah, I was a tough, hard bitch, and I did this.” So I really want to write the imagined, but I can’t do that without having some link to lived experience. Damien Wilkins, one of my teachers, once asked someone, “What do you have to do to a real experience to make it fiction?” I hope I never find an answer, but I’m reaching for it every day. Audition got started because I got stuck in a cupboa."
"It was a huge learning curve, to be honest. I never pictured myself writing a novel, so when my husband suggested I take some time off work and do some writing, I thought I’ll have a go at some short stories. And then I discovered this story, and it just wouldn’t fit within the form of the short story, so I enrolled in a fiction course – I had joined it for short stories, though it was generally for beginning fiction – but I had to figure this out a lot quicker than the course offered, so alongside that I bought about thirty books on ‘how to’, and how other authors have done it, and really threw myself into figuring out the structure of a novel. With poetry you can’t just ‘dip in’ – the poems are a complete little story on their own, they are like little starbursts. But this story took two years, and I couldn’t write poetry that whole time, because it just felt like a completely different discipline. What I did learn was to try and bring the poetry through with me, so I still felt like a poet writing this book. So in a way I think I’ve been able to have the best of both worlds."
"Yes I hope so – I want to continue to write fiction, I really have the fiction writing bug, but I hope I haven’t lost the knack for writing poetry. I’m going to keep plugging away at it every now and then, because I do love it. It’s a very difficult art form, and I admire the people who have done very well at it."
"Yes, I’ve been quite overwhelmed actually. It’s really not what you expect, especially for a first novel, so I am absolutely thrilled that people are connecting – not only to the family side, the interest in chasing your own roots – but also to the history of Pakeha in New Zealand, and what it was like from that side too. I’m really intrigued to see what people find in it – they all find something different, and I’m liking the layers that people are seeing. So I’m thrilled, you couldn’t ask for more."
"Yes, the names were right at the top of the tree, the four Finnegan family members, with a note saying “murdered” on it – “Otahuhu murders 1865” – with the murderer’s name and the date he was hung. Everything else was just standard on that family tree, with little dates, and arrows, no information at all apart from that, so I thought ‘that is rather interesting.’"
"No, not at all. The family tree came to me in a peculiar way – my mother and my father’s second wife are cousins, so their family trees are the same – so it was my father’s second wife who did the tree, and I never got hold of it until she died. Both her and my mother are unfortunately no longer with us, and my brother had the family tree, and I saw it there and swiped it. So I’d never seen it before that – I’d known it existed and I had tried to get it, but was unsuccessful. So I went home and unravelled it, because it was all in this funny little scroll, and it was the first time I saw it. Then I was researching straight away and I thought this would be a short story. The interest wasn’t initially around the family thing, but the story – I wanted to know who these people were and their times. Both James Stack and the Finnegan family were Irish Catholic, so they had come out from different parts of Ireland – one south, one north – and I wanted to know what brought them out here, who they were and what it was like here for them; that really was the basis of my research."
"No, again I sort of stumbled along. I was writing form the perspective of James Stack initially – I had tried writing it from the mother’s point of view, but it didn’t work. So I was halfway through the novel with James Stack, when I discovered the story of the ghost of John Finnegan, and I started looking into that. Then I went to the site and found the old cottage and got talking to an elderly neighbour who had lived there forever, and he was telling me about the ghost, and as the house was abandoned for two years the neighbours would dare it each other to stay overnight to see if the ghost appeared. And this elderly gentleman had done it himself, but he said ‘it was all hoo-ha, he didn’t appear.’ But I kind of felt something while I was there – I really felt this connection to the little boy – it really intrigued me why he was still there. And so I went home and I left the second half of James behind and I wrote John’s section all in one go, and then wove it throughout the story. John became the hero from there. So it was all sort of piecemeal, it all came together as I discovered things."
"Yes, definitely, and you think about all the different branches and stories that must be in your family. I have since discovered that there is Jewish and German heritage as well, and I’m thinking, ‘what other stories are there’? I think it’s really important to know where we’ve come from, because now I can actually identify with my Irish-ness, and I can understand."
"I had the help of a fellow from the Dublin historical society – he was sending me pictures and information and I did a lot my own research – so it wasn’t hard to imagine what it was like."
"It’s all come through stories that I read of the time. The young girl being arrested for stealing a handkerchief and being put on the ship – that was a real twelve year old girl. And the famines, and the cottages being bowled over to make way for new crops and sheep while it was all going over to England – that was all happening at the time. And the same in New Zealand. The character of Abel is a ‘Pakeha Maori’, he didn’t actually exist in the story with James, but my research on Pakeha Maori – I based Abel on one particular fellow – they intrigued me. And this one that I researched in depth actually did become a mediator in the Maori land court in Auckland, and to me that was just too much richness to leave behind. There was a whole parallel going on between the Irish and the Maori, and I wanted this affinity to be shown, and also the different perspectives of these two Irish guys that came out, and the way it changed them and how they reacted to it – perhaps not as you would expect they would. And at the time someone like Abel would have been perceived as being lost, gone off the rails – but he wasn’t. He had that sprit ritual call. And again, while researching that time, the Kingitanga, there was that spiritual call that was much wiser than a lot of the European ways. In the research I also came across one of the men who was in charge of the 65th, and he resigned because he refused to accept the way the Maori were being treated – so that really was there too. There was a lot going on."
"No, and I don’t really think it was like that back then, in the early nineteenth century. I think the two sides at times really did reach out to each other – especially the lower class Europeans."
"Exactly – we can put people inside a box and say ‘your this sort of person for doing this, you’re that sort of person.’ I don’t like that at all, so I think you’re right – there is this whole middle ground that people forget, that we all move between."
"Yes, very much so. I wanted to know what made him do what he did – because there is always a story. Maybe some people are born bad but a lot the time its circumstantial, and I can kind of understand. But in the end we are formed by the choices we make."
"No, I was quite isolated from that part of the family. My mother was an only child and her father died quite young, so there was no contact. My grandmother went on to have many more children to her next marriage, as they did back then, so that was the family. But having said that, there is a relative I have been in contact with recently, just through the novel coming out, and she has described how members of her family were horrified at her delving into this, as they didn’t want the dirty linen brought out. But I haven’t really gone there – the family was much more notorious than I have written, I knew about that."
"Of course they are both Irish Catholics, so they would have had this sense of purgatory, and praying loved ones out of purgatory. But again, there is that whole grey area, and I really wanted to play with that whole idea. I have this quote from Pope John Paul, which says “heaven and hell are primarily eternal states of consciousness, rather than geographical places of later reward or punishment”. I thought that means that in life we are able to put ourselves into a state of purgatory, because it’s a state of consciousness – and therefore the punishment and reward can be cause and effect. I overlaid that on James – he has placed himself inside a state of purgatory and try as he might he just can’t seem to get himself out, whether through his own choices or through circumstances – really it’s a bit of both – and in the end he chooses his ultimate fate. And for John, still being here as a ghost, to me it made sense that he was in a state of purgatory too. Maybe for him it was choice, maybe it was literally that he was anchored to the ground somehow – to the cottage that he was born in. Then I started looking into Maori mythology, and how some return to watch over their mokopuna as birds or trees, and I thought that that was really very beautiful. They have the choice of going home – and with the Irish, home was either going back to your original home, or heaven – whatever that is for you. And so to me, that whole place of purgatory opened up opportunities, rather than being restrictive. And I thought, ‘what if we have a choice?’ We could become the brightest star in the sky so that our family could know that was us, or we could become an owl that comes to visit, or we could go home– they are all beautiful stories – why not choose?"
"Yes, and it’s also that ghostly side – it’s not a scary thing, or death not being a scary thing, it’s just a part of everyday life, that perhaps we are not aware of as much. So to me there were all these openings that I could play with, and explore. For personal reasons too – so I really enjoyed it."
"I didn’t. It was originally called ‘Mother Mary under a Bed of Carrots’ – that was my working title. But my agent thought it was too whimsical, and he gave it the title ‘Purgatory’, which I struggled with for quite some time – because it was so serious, and scary, and a bit daring – but I absolutely love it now, absolutely couldn’t imagine another title – so thank you Michael!"
"You do become quite ritualistic as a writer, and very precious about your time. Because I have no office in our house I write from my bed – so it’s a crazy little set up – I have my bed and my shelves all around me and I get up very early, kick my husband out, feed the dog, then I come straight back to bed before doing anything. I close the blinds, shut the door so it’s a darkened room, and I find that helps me focus because if it’s a beautiful day, or the wind is blowing its very distracting. So the dog usually snuggles next to me and I do this sort of head clearing thing, which seems to be a necessity, which I never realised I was doing until half way through the book when I was sort of breathing and feeling something starting to percolate – and then I would start. And I would start by reading what I had written the day before, and maybe editing. And there is always this push into the new prose – I don’t know if other writers feel that, but I actually sort of have to kick myself up the bum and say ‘go!’ It’s almost like you have to be brave and say ‘just go!’ and then you’re off."
"I just write and then I go back – and I am hideously painful at going back and back and back, and then I give it to my husband to read, and he will go “hmmm” and so then I go back again. But initially I just let it out. And I cut big sections out, where you’ve just ‘walked into the forest to pick daisies’ – after a while you become more disciplined at seeing those parts and chopping them out. Then when I’m done I feel great – there is no other feeling that equates to that."
"Yes, I have a few favourites. Tim Winton is a favourite; I just love the way his language is so beautiful and the way he crosses that line too into magical realism, where you are in this normal place and this strangeness will waft in, whether it’s a ghost or whatever – I have much respect for that. At the time I also read Hamish Clayton’s Wulf and that inspired me a great deal – again the language and the story – I found him to be extraordinary. And I’ve always loved Janette Frame, and she does similar things. At university I tended to lean more towards sort of gothic novels, so it will be interesting to see what my next one is like. I’m not planning it to be dark or scary in any way, but definitely explorative – just see where it takes me. It’ll be interesting to see whether this dark, slightly gothic thing is me – I’m not sure. Maybe it was just this novel."
"Apparently we Kiwis are really bad at that, not sticking to genre! We must have a real creative freedom – I like it."
"Yes, I have a story pretty much mapped out, but again they change as you are writing it. It’s centred around another murder that I know of, and that I’m quite intrigued with, and its more contemporary. So it think possibly I will explore contemporary issues through it – I’m quite looking forward to it."
"Back to the bedroom, very soon! As soon as all this settles I will be incognito again – for the next two years!"
"& so I bring my journal writing & sit amongst / the ferociously chic at Cafe Flor (which I call / Cafe Voyeur) in an era when everyone has a therapist & no one has a lover. and I have a slice of carrot cake / and a frothy mochachina, sprinkled generously with nutmeg / & cinnamon, sitting there pondering "The Convolution of Desire / & Terror that is the paradigm of human sexuality." And I write / it down completely impressed with myself, smug with the glow, / wondering if anyone-man or woman, or middle aged transsexual / with bad makeup from the nether twilight world of the Tenderloin-- / would stop by to cruise me. YES, EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE / I HAVE AN OUTSTANDING MOMENT OF OBSOLETE HAPPINESS."
"Sybil was now banging on about how hard Humph worked and the havoc caused by boarding school fees for seven. Jack refrained from telling her that you would expect seven children to be more expensive to raise than one or two and that no one had an electric cattle prod on either her rump or Humph's as they herded their offspring into private schools."
"Later that evening, he sat in the bar, pint in one hand, pipe in the other, with good food beneath his belt and listened to the natural harmony of the Welsh fishermen singing their songs of Wales and the sea"
"Wellington, with its hills and fault lines and glittering sea, is like a perfect espresso cup of culture and energy. It’s also home to a lot of quiet minorities, like the Greek community I come from, who carry stories that might be less well known than others. I can’t wait to return"
"In the story of the Trojan Horse, after a ten-year siege, the Greeks pretend to sail away and leave a “gift” of a wooden horse on the doorstep of the city of Troy. The Trojans pull the horse into their city. But, under the cover of night, a select force of men creep out of it, torching the city, and thus winning the war for the Greeks."
"I am a Greek-New Zealand writer and I am building a horse like this — or, more accurately, I’m allowing it to build itself."
"But, in this story, the Trojan Horse is a non-fiction book that I’m writing about the media in Aotearoa — and the warriors are writers. Māori writers, Pasifika writers, French and Chinese and “other” writers. Any writers that haven’t been identified by the press as part of a Pākehā mainstream."
"And the city of Troy is Pākehā culture, which I envisage in this book as a walled fortress. In front of this fortress, the horse is taking shape. There are voices clamouring inside it, about to be let out."
"The voices belong to some of Aotearoa’s foremost writers: Tusiata Avia, Tina Makereti, Chris Tse, Paula Morris, and Karlo Mila, among many others, who I’ve interviewed for my upcoming book, The Outliers: Who do we want to be?"
"My interest in the way these writers are portrayed in the media began * when I started a PhD in creative writing at Victoria University, in 2009. I realised that even though some of them were challenging ethnic stereotypes with their work, they were often completely exoticised in the media around them."
"I discovered that — contrary to what I’d expected — in the 40 years since the publication of Witi Ihimaera’s first book, the mainstream media’s representation of these authors has not become more nuanced, or less racist. Instead, the racism has gone underground, coming out as a kind of simplistic “celebration”, and keeping all such authors firmly on the outside: nice, exotic additions to “New Zealand Literature."
"You must be true to yourself. Strong enough to be true to yourself. Brave enough to be strong enough to be true to yourself. Wise enough to be brave enough, to be strong enough to shape yourself from what you actually are.”"
"So often I have said in the past, when a war is over, the statesmen should not go into conference one with another, but should turn their attention to the infant rooms, since it is from there that comes peace or war.”"
"the more violent the boy, the more I see that he creates, and when he kicks the others with his big boots, treads on fingers on the mat, hits another over the head with a piece of wood or throws a stone, I put clay in his hands, or chalk. He can create bombs if he likes or draw my house in flame, but it is the creative vent that is widening all the time and the destructive one atrophying, however much it may look to the contrary. And anyway I have always been more afraid of the weapon unspoken than of the one on the blackboard"
"She groaned as her face turned to press against the rosewood floor. "Welly, remind me to order a better mattress for my bed. This one is far too firm.""
"Oh, Eliza," Wellington gasped, now remembering why he was in these lush surroundings. "No broken nose, I hope.""
""S'all right," Braun slurred. Her voiced dropped to a whisper. "My ample bosom broke my fall."
"Mortals were such fickle creatures. They called into the dark, demanded answers and attention from forces they could not comprehend, and yet when they had that attention and those answers, they complained about them.”"
"Be that as it may, we were--and no doubt, still are--held under scrutiny, with that whole Phoenix Society brouhaha. It is imperative we remain on our best behaviour, a feat that you did not exactly manage effortlessly with your shenanigans in Edinburgh"
"I think you will agree the sign of a civilised society is a regular dining schedule."
"She sighed heavily before whispering, “I’m still a bit confused as to what we are waiting for.” “We are waiting for one of the constants in our world, Miss Braun,” Wellington assured her. “At the end of every opera, there is the grand finale, where the music continues its gradual crescendo, the tenor and tempo rising ever so gradually for that pinnacle of dramatic tension, that moment of anticipation—” “Welly, are you talking about opera or about sex?” His next words caught in his throat. For a woman of higher tastes and seeming refinement, this woman could be utterly crass."
"Nay, you attract mayhem, chaos, and anarchy wherever your delicate feet tread. Around you there is no such thing as a coincidence.""
""Why do you think it is always me, Director?" Eliza protested. "It could be Books. My father always told me to beware the quiet ones"
"Humans don’t like correction,” Father’s sub-routine reminded her. “Especially by our kind"
"The bootprints of history tramp through my children's veins. I hear my father telling me about the great road that ran above his village right along the Adriatic. Napoleonova Cesta he called it proudly. Napoleon's road. It was built by Marshal Marmont when Napoleon made him governor of the Dalmatia that the Emperor renamed Illyria, giving it back its ancient name. Was Marshal Marmont the Duc de Dalmatie who signed with a flourish the document giving the Nanto-Bordelaise Company the charter for French settlement in Akaroa ? I like to think he was.”"
"I’m in love with that girl,” she said out loud in amazement, because she knew that this was a life-changing thing and life-changing things should be said aloud, should have a moment in time, and a place in the air, some molecular structure to make them real. I’m in love with that girl, she heard as it reverberated inside her head. And it was truth, she realised, as things are which you don’t think, but discover have always existed.”"
"Well, Louie, you’ll know then that Leviticus also tells us not to cut our beards, not to wear linen and wool together nor to eat crayfish or frogs or snails. I’m afraid that if we adhered to Leviticus the entire French nation would be an abomination in the eyes of the Lord"
"I am in love. It just happened, I never sought it, but I couldn't turn away from it"
"How lucky you are, to love and to be loved in return.”"
"Guilt isn't in cat vocabulary. They never suffer remorse for eating too much, sleeping too long or hogging the warmest cushion in the house. They welcome every pleasurable moment as it unravels and savour it to the full until a butterfly or falling leaf diverts their attention. They don't waste energy counting the number of calories they've consumed or the hours they've frittered away sunbathing."
"Cats don't beat themselves up about not working hard enough. They don't get up and go, they sit down and stay. For them, lethargy is an art form. From their vantage points on top of fences and window ledges, they see the treadmills of human obligations for what they are - a meaningless waste of nap time.”"
"“People persuade themselves they deserve easy lives, that being human makes us somehow exempt from pain. The theory works fine until we face the inevitable challenges. Our conditioning of denial in no way equips us to deal with the difficult times that not one of us escapes."
"Cleo's motto seemed to be: Life's tough and that's okay, because life is also fantastic. Love it, live it - but don't be fooled into thinking it's not harsh sometimes. Those who've survived periods of bleakness are often better at savoring good times and wise enough to understand that good times are actually great.”"
"Then there was the realisation that I didn't actually feel that much better when I was thin(ner). In fact the 'thin' version felt worse because I lived with hunger clawing at my stomach all the time, and in fear that I was going to get fat again. After years of neuroticism I'd finally understood those who loved me would continue to put up with me fat or thin, and those who didn't ignored me. As a middle-aged woman I was pretty much invisible anyway. To pass unnoticed through an image-obsessed society is surprisingly liberating"
"One of the many ways in which cats are superior to humans is their mastery of time. By making no attempt to dissect years into months, days into hours and minutes into seconds, cats avoid much misery. Free from the slavery of measuring every moment, worrying whether they are late or early, young or old, or if Christmas is six weeks away, felines appreciate the present in all its multidimensional glory. They never worry about endings or beginnings. From their paradoxical viewpoint an ending is often a beginning. The joy of basking on a window ledge can seem eternal, though if measured in human time it's diminished to a paltry eighteen minutes."
"He'd also developed his own version of making the most of every minute. "Through Sam I found out how quickly things can change. Because of him I've learned to appreciate each moment and try not to hold on to things. Life's more exciting and intense that way. It's like the yogurt that goes off after three days. It tastes so much better than the stuff that lasts three weeks."
"If humans could program themselves to forget time, they would savor a string of pleasures and possibilities. Regrets about the past would dissolve, alongside anxieties for the future. We'd notice the color of the sky and be liberated to seize the wonder of being alive in this moment. If we could be more like cats our lives would seem eternal.”"
"“I used to wish I had an easier life," he mused. "Some families sail through years with nothing touching them. They have no tragedies. They go on about how lucky they are. Yet sometimes it seems to me they're half alive. When something goes wrong for them, and it does for everyone sooner or later, their trauma is much worse. They've had nothing bad happen to them before. In the meantime, they think little problems, like losing a wallet, are big deals. They think it's ruined their day. They have no idea what a hard day's like. It's going to be incredibly tough for them when they find out.""