Poets From New Zealand

"[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 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."

"[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."

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

"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."

"[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."

"[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."

"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.”"

"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"

"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!"

"Sometimes, the waves grow hushed, but the sea is always there, touching, caressing, eating the earth.... (chapter 6, p249)"

"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)"

"Hands are sacred things. Touch is personal, fingers of love, feelers of blind eyes, tongues of those who cannot talk. (chapter 2, p71)"

"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)"

"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)"

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"While the dull talk idly streams, He sits upon the bank and dreams, Till some careless word that's said Finds a fellow in his head..."

"A time will come, a time will come, (Though the world will never be quite the same), When the people sit in the summer sun, Watching, watching the beautiful game."

"He raised his arms as if to claw down the sky upon him. (p133)"

"The moon was drenching the sky with loneliness. (p107)"

"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)"

"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)"

"Sometimes life has a habit of flooding over you and rushing you along in its overwhelming tide. (p63)"

"Hui e, haumi e, taiki e. Let it be done."

"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)"

"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."

"It felt right not to talk. It felt good just to be. Sometimes there was no need to fill the air with words.”"

"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."

"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.”"

"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 everybody else is bending with the wind, very few people will lean against it."

"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."

"We bow only to the highest mountain."

"Alas, being a New Zealander is such an exquisite dilemma."

"This is where we start. Let it be blank. Blank is different from nothing.”"

"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."

"To work — to work! It is such infinite delight to know that we still have the best things to do."

"Would you not like to try all sorts of lives — one is so very small — but that is the satisfaction of writing — one can impersonate so many people."

"To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure."

"[On 2 June] I lunched with K.M. & had 2 hours priceless talk—priceless in the sense that to no one else can I talk in the same disembodied way about writing; without altering my thought more than I alter it in writing here."

"I think that in some abstruse way Murry corrupted and perverted and destroyed Katherine both as a person and a writer. She was a very serious writer, but her gifts were those of an intense realist, with a superb sense of ironic humour and fundamental cynicism. She got enmeshed in the sticky sentimentality of Murry and wrote against the grain of her own nature. At the bottom of her mind she knew this, I think, and it enraged her. And that was why she was so often enraged against Murry."

"If I had to describe her in one word I would choose the word exquisite. She was exquisite in her person: soft, fine, shiny brown hair and delicately grained skin, not tall and not small and not thin nor stout, just right. When we went bathing I thought her pretty as a statuette. She was always scrupulously groomed."

"I want to recall her as she was day by day as a woman friend and neighbour, gay and gallant and wonderful."

"The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless and free your actions will be."

"Some couples go over their budgets very carefully every month. Others just go over them."

"Once we have learned to read, the meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness."

"I am treating you as my friend, asking you to share my present minuses in the hope I can ask you to share my future pluses."