“You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they've been read...”
― Keri Hulme, quote from The Bone People
“A family can be the bane of one's existence. A family can also be most of the meaning of one's existence. I don't know whether my family is bane or meaning, but they have surely gone away and left a large hole in my heart.”
― Keri Hulme, quote from The Bone People
“But hands are sacred things. Touch is personal, fingers of love, feelers of blind eyes, tongues of those who cannot talk…”
― Keri Hulme, quote from The Bone People
“Why? is the boy's motto, why does, why is, why not? Food, weather, time, fires, sea and season, clothes and cars and people; it's all grist to the mill of why.”
― Keri Hulme, quote from The Bone People
“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.”
― Keri Hulme, quote from The Bone People
“Oh all the world is a little queer, except thee and me, and sometimes, I wonder about thee.”
― Keri Hulme, quote from The Bone People
“Sunflowers and seashells and logarithmic spirals (said Kerewin); sweep of galaxies and the singing curve of the universe (said Kerewin); the oscilating wave thrumming in the nothingness of every atom’s heart (said Kerewin); did you think I could build a square house? So the round shell house holds them all in its spiralling embrace. Noise and riot, peace and quiet, all is music in this sphere.”
― Keri Hulme, quote from The Bone People
“She had debated, in the frivolity of the beginning, whether to build a hole or a tower; a hole, because she was fond of hobbits, or a tower — well, a tower for many reasons, but chiefly because she liked spiral staircases.”
― Keri Hulme, quote from The Bone People
“Sometimes, the waves grow hushed, but the sea is always there, touching, caressing, eating the earth...”
― Keri Hulme, quote from The Bone People
“If I were you," the operator sounds happy he's not.”
― Keri Hulme, quote from The Bone People
“The color has faded out of the sky. It is grey, becoming darker as the world turns herself round a little more. The clouds are long and black and ragged, like the wings of stormbattered dragons.”
― Keri Hulme, quote from The Bone People
“...I was trying to make her fit my idea of what a friend, a partner was. I could see only the one way...whatever she thought she was, bend her to the idea that lovers are, marriage is, the only sanity. Don't accept merely what she can offer, make her give and take more...”
― Keri Hulme, quote from The Bone People
Keri Hulme
Born place: in Christchurch, New Zealand
Born date March 9, 1947
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“It is easy to be wise after the event.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Complete Sherlock Holmes
“But you haven't tried. You haven't tried once. First you refused to admit that there was a menace at all! Then you reposed an absolutely blind faith in the Emperor! Now you've shifted it to Hari Seldon. Throughout you have invariably relied on authority or on the past—never on yourselves."
His fists balled spasmodically. "It amounts to a diseased attitude—a conditioned reflex that shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is a question of opposing authority. There seems no doubt ever in your minds that the Emperor is more powerful than you are, or Hari Seldon Wiser. And that's wrong don't you see?"
For some reason, no one cared to answer him.
Hardin continued: "It isn't just you. It's the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin's idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject—written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weight the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don't you see that there's something wrong with that?"
Again the note of near-pleading in his voice.
Again no answer. He went on: "And you men and half of Terminus as well are just as bad.. We sit here, considering the Encyclopedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We're receding and forgetting, don't you see? Here in the Periphery they've lost nuclear power. In Gamma Andromeda, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they're to restrict nuclear power."
And for the third time: "Don't you see? It's galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration—a stagnation!”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from Foundation
“For the first time, she recognized the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her early teens, and later as a young woman. The recognition did not lessen the reality, the poignancy of the revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability. The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded.”
― Kate Chopin, quote from The Awakening
“During that spring afternoon’s jaunt in the company of one of Poland’s most influential anti-Semites, her admirer Walter Dürrfeld, like his host, uttered not a word about Jews. Six years later almost all that she heard from Dürrfeld’s lips concerned Jews and their consignment to oblivion.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“ان الحيوانات تولد حيوانات ... اما الانسان فلا تلده انسانا, بل تربيه ليصيح كذلك”
― Jostein Gaarder, quote from Sophie's World
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Wolf IslandBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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