18 quotes
This first part of the story is about two sisters, Ngarua and Maraenohonoho, who quarrelled over a canoe.
beginning of Dogside Story (2001)
The city was a great loom weaving its tangles and tufts of people into haphazard multicoloured fabric.
Mutuwhenua : the moon sleeps (1978)
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.
Salt cures.
Sea washes. It cleans.
Expanse enlivens the spirit, frees the mind.
Chappy (2015)
Why is it that one set of stories is called "mythology", and another set of stories is called "the truth"?
Interview (1999)
Learning about each other is not as one-sided as it used to be.
Interview (2016)
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 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.
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.
Interview (2016)
'Nothing wrong with money as long as we remember it's food not God. You eat it, not worship it...' (chapter 13 p94)
Potiki (1986)
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.
Interview (2021)
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.
Interview (2016)
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.
The Contemporary Pacific (1998)
That’s what I like to do. I just start out and follow the characters.
Interview (2016)
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.
Interview (2021)
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.
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)
Tu (2004)
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.