Children S Authors

"My poem is no accident. My poem does all these things on purpose. My poem has a plan to take over everyone and everything."

"My poem steals my neighbour’s land, and everybody’s land. My poem steals 94 percent of all the land in New Zealand. It steals millions upon millions of acres of land."

"When I write a poem, my “moral compass is marginal” at best and the consequences of my poem “devastate” innocent people all over the country. Look at my poem, causing the “radicalisation of people” and ruining “social cohesion”."

"No colonisation. No genocide. No intergenerational trauma. No two centuries of white privilege."

"The neighbours hear me writing a poem about colonisation and they yell: Stop that “race-baiting”, our kids are trying to sleep."

"When I write a poem “sexual and racial violence” burst out of me like wolf-fur through the rents in my smooth brown skin. I start howling at the moon and “inciting racial violence” all over the place."

"Oh no! Here I go again, with my pen and my exercise book, inciting “hate speech” and “dehumanising” people."

"Now, I’m howling and ripping off my clothes and writing a poem which is “inciting violence” right through the walls of my house."

"When I am under a full moon, I start writing a poem about colonisation, which is exactly the same as “inciting murder”. Writing a poem is the same as a “manifesto” justifying terrorism and massacre."

"My daughter slumps down outside the bathroom door in tears and whispers: I’m tired of my “acceptable ethnicity”. We brown people have all the privileges now. We can say anything we like and get away with it."

"In the space of a few generations, my poem has traumatised the people who originally owned this land and their language almost disappears."

"My poem kidnaps children, puts them in state welfare institutions, abuses them and stops them speaking their own language."

"When I write a poem it turns into a “hate crime” right then and there. It springs up off the page, and marches out into the street like an army of ten thousand colonial soldiers armed with guns."

"Damn this poem! It is making my jaw grow long and shaggy, fangs grow from my mouth and my eyes turn red. Here I go, on all fours now, with a tail growing out from under my skirt like a wild dog. Here I go, writing a “racist rant about one of history’s greatest explorers”."

"My views become exactly the same as “those expressed in Germany”. What I mean is, I’m the whole of Nazism and the entire Second World War."

"Sorry guys, the thing is, when I write a poem I become a werewolf."

"There is truly nothing more to think about."

"Later, my white neighbour will come over to my house and say: Let me explain something to you, Tusiata. “Racism is like a scab on your knee”, and “if you pick it”, what will happen? “Leave it alone and it will heal”, otherwise I fear the “wound will get infected”. And what will happen to me then? Huh? What will happen to me then?"

"My daughter locks me in the bathroom and says through the door: Mum, stop that “racist violence dressed up as art”, because, Mum, “poor white people disaffected by the effects of globalism” couldn’t say those things."

"My biggest fear has always been that someone would be trapped back here and couldn't get help. No ambulance or police would be able to get through. It's good to know that after all of these years, my family will be safe. I've been stuck many times from the outside and couldn't get home and I've been stuck on the inside and couldn't get out."

"He's been in the Coast Guard his entire life, and one of the things he does and does well is what the Coast Guard motto is, be always prepared. He takes every new event and gets down and starts working and sees it to its end."

"It's a strenuous job every day of your life to live up to the way you look on the screen."

"I guess I became an actress because I didn't want to be myself."

"[While she was a model] Someone in the studio noticed me sitting in the background. They asked me whether I would pose for girls' hats, and with some diffidence I consented. My first posing was terribly self-conscious. The photographer liked my type, and employed me steadily that summer. I got $5 an hour and sometimes had five or six sittings in a day."

"[1977 comment on Gary Cooper] I loved working with Gary Cooper. Gary was my favorite. He was so terrific-looking, and so easy to work with."

"[on making Only Angels Have Wings (1939)] I loved sinking my head into Cary Grant's chest."

"[on director George Stevens] George Stevens started out as a cameraman with Laurel and Hardy, and he learned so many wonderful tricks, like having us walk forward while looking backward and then bumping into something. George was a darling man, so great with comedy. It's too bad he got serious."

"[on her early acting days] My very "naturalness" was my undoing. I had to learn that to appear natural on the screen requires a vast amount of training, that is the test of an actor's art. It would be more spectacular if I could say that out of the hurt and humiliation of that failure was born a determination to success, to prove I had the makings of an actress. But it wouldn't be true. That urge came later."

"[on her first marriage, which only lasted a day] Julian [Julian Anker] looked a lot like Abraham Lincoln, and that's probably why I fell in love with him. One day we were out driving and he suddenly said, "Hey, why don't we get married?" So we lied about our ages and got married in a sheriff's office. You should have heard our families' reactions - all sorts of screaming and shouting and carrying on about suicide. Well, neither Julian nor I had enough income to make it possible for us to live together, so our marriage lasted one day."

"[In 1940] Those two and a half years on Broadway were the happiest years of my life. I loved the stage. I think every girl who wants to become an actress should put in some years on the stage."

"I wanted to become a really accomplished actress, but I didn't know how to act, and had no chance to learn. In those days the studios didn't have coaches or drama schools and it was almost impossible to get on the sets to watch the older players. I finally decided there was only one thing to do: go back to New York and try to get into some plays there."

"First I played ingénues and western heroines; then I played western heroines and ingénues. That diet of roles became as monotonous as a diet of spinach. The studio wouldn't trust me with any other kind of role, because I had no experience in any other kind. And I didn't see how I was ever going to acquire any other experience if I couldn't get any other kind of role. It was a vicious circle."

"I bumped into every kind of disappointment, and was frustrated at every turn. Roles promised me were given to other players, pictures that offered me a chance were shelved, no one was particularly interested in me, and I had not developed a strength of personality to make anyone believe I had special talents. I wanted so desperately to succeed that I drove myself relentlessly, taking no time off for pleasures, or for friendships - yet aiming at the stars, I was still floundering."

"It's hardly fair for women to do the same things at the same hours every day of their lives, while men have new experiences, meet new people every day. I felt that way as a little girl, with two older brothers around the house. It seemed to me that they led adventurous lives, compared with mine. I felt cheated and frustrated. I became a tomboy in self-defense. I decided that I was going to do things that were exciting, or at least interesting."

"If people don't like your work, all the still pictures in the world can't help you and nothing written about you, even oceans of it, will make you popular."

"(on doing interviews) Quite frankly, I'd rather have my throat slit."

"[speaking in in the 1930s] I've never had a single close intimate girlfriend in all my life. I never had a chum to whom I could confide my secrets. I suppose that accounts for the fact that now it is so painfully difficult for me to open my heart and confide in people who are, so often, almost strangers. You have to learn so very young to open your heart."

"[About her first marriage] There was nothing tragic about it - it was a case of willfulness."

"[About her early career] I was all right in long shots, but when it came to close-ups, sustained emotion was beyond me. I knew nothing about acting and often wondered why I had not continued with my plan to become a teacher of modern languages."

"I am not an adult, that's my explanation of myself. Except when I am working on a set, I have all the inhibitions and shyness of the bashful, backward child . . . unless I have something very much in common with a person, I am lost. I am swallowed up in my own silence."

"The fact that I did not marry George Bernard Shaw is the only real disappointment I've had."

"[on Hollywood] I hated the place - not the work, but the lack of privacy, those terrible prying fan magazine writers and all the surrounding exploitation."

"Written under the pen name Olive Thorne Miller, most of her children's fiction has been forgotten, but her , both for children and adults, are still read. She became interested in bird watching in 1880 and avidly pursued this hobby for the rest of her life. ... Olive Thorne Miller wrote books on birds that reflected a close observation of their habits. Although her treatment was sometimes , most of her facts were accurate, and her works were useful in stimulating popular interest in ."

"Mrs. Irene Grosvenor Wheelock, author of several books, and a careful student of living birds in the nest, has found decided individuality in young bluebirds as early as ten days old. One would be gentle, easily pacified, and trustful, while another was fierce and resentful of captivity."

"The solo of the differs from nearly all other bird-songs that I know, being a clear, distinct whistle that may easily be reduced to our musical scale, and perfectly imitated by the human voice; in this latter quality it is almost unique. The notes are very few, usually two, never, I think, more than three; and the little ditty consists of, first, a single long, deliberate note, then two short repetitious of one a third higher, followed by three triplets at the same pitch. It is so distinct, indeed, that the of northern Minnesota—as a traveler in that country kindly wrote me—have put it into words, namely, "Pu'orn chiman, chig-a-big, chig-a-big, chig-a-big," which being translated means, "The Sioux canoes are close to shore, close to shore, close to shore," and the friendly bird is held in much esteem by the grateful Chippewas."

"So long as you do only what you have done every day, though it be to sit within three feet of their nest, most birds accept you as a , but if you vary from your usual programme you shall have every bird within sight and hearing excited, calling in warning tones, anxious and angry "phit's," "tut's," and "chack's" on every side."

"A lady who has given us some charming books of minute and faithful studies of birds and beasts, Mrs. Effie Bignell, says of the two robins who were free in her house, that they were entirely different in every characteristic, one of them loving and gentle "like a perfect gentleman," while the other was greed itself, with shocking table manners, and in every way different."

"Also I should like to explain how a lover of free birds can endure to keep them in confinement. Each inhabitant of a in my house has been liberated from the positive discomforts of a , and besides the wearied effort to make their lives happy and as free as possible in a room, the moment one shows a desire for the world outside my windows, he is gladly allowed to depart."

"Because of its quiet tints, the beauty of plumage of the is often underrated. Nothing can be more attractive than the soft cinnamon browns of his back and wings, and the satiny white of breast and under parts, tinged in places with buff, and decorated profusely with lance-shaped spots of brown. Lovers of birds alive and free have reason to rejoice that our most interesting birds are not gaudy in coloring. The indiscriminate and terrible , is surely enough to make the most long-suffering lover of nature cry out in grief and pain. To me — let me say it frankly — they look not like an adornment of feathers, but like the dead bodies of birds, foully murdered to minister to a passing fashion."

"We passed s and playing-grounds, and heard from open factory windows the magnified cheerfulness of ""."