26 Quotes by Keri Hulme

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.

The company you keep at death is, of all things, most dependent on chance.

Wars of small kingdoms and forgotten lands, what do chessmen dream of in the dark?

It’s the possibility that when you’re dead you might still go on hurting that bothers me.

There really is no place like home, even when it’s grown a couple of sizes too small...

Through poverty, godhunger, the family debacle, I kept a sense of worth. I could limn and paint like no-one else in this human-wounded land: I was worth the while of living. Now my skill is dead. I should be.

Betelgeuse, Achenar. Orion. Aquila. Centre the Cross and you have a steady compass. But there’s no compass for my ever disoriented soul, only ever beckoning ghost lights. In the one sure direction, to the one sure end.

I have a grasshopper and haphazard mind y’know, a brain that listens to all sorts of things as well as itself.