Quotes by New Zealander Authors - Page 11

When your position is one of peace, then you're truly powerful.
Sue Fitzmaurice
If we really are spiritual beings living a physical existence, then we have incredible power.
Sue Fitzmaurice
Do I look like I want to be eaten alive after sex?
Nalini Singh
I don’t want to be your snack, your chew-toy, your fuck-buddy. Find a vampire to sink your fang into.
Nalini Singh
My greatest strength is an unfocused mind. This is because while you are all thinking of one idea, I’m thinking of five different ideas. My greatest weakness however is an unfocused mind. This is because while I’m supposed to be thinking about one thing, I’m actually thinking of five other things.
Ben Mitchell
You can’t fathom the alien mind.
Adam Christopher
When you don't grasp something or remember something, I think your mind at last says, "Okay," and part of it accepts this. In the end your mind gets to welcome that deadening. that's what I believe anyway. Half of our memoryloss is by choice.
Anna Smaill
Athletes need to enjoy their training. They don't enjoy going down to the track with a coach making them do repetitions until they're exhausted. From enjoyment comes the will to win.
Arthur Lydiard
... sometimes love becomes a power game between ambitions that parents have for their children and the ambitions that children have for themselves.
Witi Ihimaera
... the love which Kahu received from Koro Apirana was the sort that dropped off the edge of the table, like breadcrumbs after everybody else has had a big meal.
Witi Ihimaera
I believe in kindness and karma—which could make me a Buddhist. I believe in mystic healing and crystals’ powers—which could make me a witch. I believe in truth, honor, and forgiveness—which could make me a Christian. I even believe in the existence of past lives and that each and every one of us is watched over by guides from the other side—which, to some, would make me totally woo-woo squared.
Emma Mildon
When was the last time she had trusted God, really rusted Him, without reservations, without a backup plan or a safety net?
Kara Isaac
Now he understood what it was to be a man: that it was to be weak as well as strong, to be foolish sometimes and wise sometimes, to know love as well as to kill. And he had learned that there were other paths for him, other gods who called in the deep places of the earth, in the lap of wavelets on the shore, in the breath of the wind. He had learned that there were other kinds of courage. He knew, with deep certainty, that the islands held a new path for him. He need only move forward and find it.
Juliet Marillier
Down they went, into the darkness. Down ancient, worn steps coated in slippery mildew. Down into the deep recesses of the earth, far beneath the corridors of Deep-Spire.
Sam J. Charlton
We cannot know the future. All we can do is face it bravely. We should take heed of those we love and respect. But in the end, we make every decision alone.
Juliet Marillier
All that he had of her was his memory, where he held every moment, every single moment that she had been his. That was all he had, to keep out the loneliness.
Juliet Marillier
Our passing interrupted the road crossing, and the crowd bunched on both sides waited for us to go by as we all waited for the war to go by, thinking we can suspend or postpone living and not knowing that in war the heart grows older than it does in dreams
Dan Davin
Under her palm, his heart beat strong and sure. It was such a human sound, so honest, so real.
Nalini Singh
I look into my heart and see the abyss looking back at me.''I won't let you fall.
Nalini Singh
Be gentle with him, Mercy. He's got a heart as big as Texas— he'll die for you without blinking. But he doesn't expect anyone to do the same for him.
Nalini Singh
Take care of my heart won't you, Sophie? It's a little odd having it outside my body-but I'm planning to steal yours to make up for it.
Nalini Singh
If love makes the world go around, then money greases the axles.
Grant McLachlan
The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy of the half-light—grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.
Eleanor Catton
The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family, the sax teacher continues. Saxophonists are admired because they are dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of themselves.
Eleanor Catton
There were some low moments out there on the road tonight—abandonment and what’s the point?—but then I pulled in a radio station from Albuquerque playing historical rap and breakdance circa 1982. Kurtis Blow and disco synthesizers made me feel like I could drive all night.
Chris Kraus
What music do you like?” he asked between calls.“Cheery, chirpy pop.”Wincing, he pulled up a station that delivered exactly that. “You owe me.”“Come on”—she turned in her seat to face him once more—“it’s not that bad.”“I’m sorry? I can’t hear you past the sugar blocking my eardrums.
Nalini Singh
And Goneville? It is a name that kept coming up as I was writing this book, and each time its meaning shifted a little. It's almost Gonville, the suburb of Whanganui where Johnny Devlin, New Zealand's first rock 'n'roll star, grew up, so arguably the birthplace of New Zealand rock 'n'roll. But it is also an imaginary place that might be every obscure New Zealand town that every obscure New Zealand band ever played.
Nick Bollinger
His touch was like a bard's on his instrument, and it awakened a deep and mysterious music in my body.
Juliet Marillier
Being willing to feel my pain isn't another strategy I can use to avoid my pain. It is genuinely accepting that sometimes stuff really sucks. Sometimes life can really hurt. Sometimes this world isn't what I signed up for. Sometimes I still feel like I would do anything not to have these feelings and these thoughts... Willingness to allow suffering to be there is hard. Damn hard. And often frightening too. And the only thing harder is not being willing to allow suffering to be there.
Ben Sedley
It’s amazing what people create using their pain. Work that is touched by melancholy has its own unique beauty. Even the word ‘melancholy’ is pretty, the way it rolls on your tongue. I think sadness adds something to literature that is unique. It’s an ingredient like . . .” I thought for a moment. “Like salt. Salt has that power to completely transform a dish. I think sadness has that same transformative effect in literature.
Lang Leav
I can't believe how hard it is. The pain is indescribable. It's like I've been turned into sandstone and my insides are being slowly hollowed out by a chisel and mallet.
Lang Leav
I have stopped painting. I stand in front of the easel, brush in hand, but my mind is blank. It is as if I have been struck by a strange kind of blindness.
Linda Olsson
The peacemaker must have the strongest heart and the toughest will in the room.
Nalini Singh
Do you know what it is like,to lie in bed awake;with thoughts to hauntyou every night,of all your past mistakes.Knowing sleep will set it right - if you were not to wake.
Lang Leav
I ran then, following the power, ran with joy and a wild, winging certainty, right into the hearth of everything I loved.And there was no earth, no cold, no dust, nor stones nor water rushing past; but only this joy, this singing, awesome flight straight into the soul of God.Into fire.
Sherryl Jordan
The earth grieves, and I grieve, and I am weary of the fight
Sherryl Jordan
Sometimes, the waves grow hushed, but the sea is always there, touching, caressing, eating the earth...
Keri Hulme
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
Man might carve his mark on the earth but unless he's vigilant, Nature will take it all back.
Witi Ihimaera
Work is my vacation from worry of what to do with my life
Janna Cachola
We must primarily become seekers of God instead of founders of works, for work will not sustain us through the traumas of incarnation.
Viv Grigg
Assiduity, it means sit down until you do it. Commit yourself to your work and study.
Lucas Remmerswaal
I am not a machine. For what can a machine know of the smell of wet grass in the morning, or the sound of a crying baby? I am the feeling of the warm sun against my skin; I am the sensation of a cool wave breaking over me. I am the places I have never seen, yet imagine when my eyes are closed. I am the taste of another's breath, the color of her hair.You mock me for the shortness of my life span, but it is this very fear of dying which breathes life into me. I am the thinker who thinks of thought. I am curiosity, I am reason, I am love, and I am hatred. I am indifference. I am the son of a father, who in turn was a father’s son. I am the reason my mother laughed and the reason my mother cried. I am wonder and I am wondrous. Yes, the world may push your buttons as it passes through your circuitry. But the world does not pass through me. It lingers. I am in it and it is in me. I am the means by which the universe has come to know itself. I am the thing no machine can ever make. I am meaning.
Bernard Beckett
Like a lot of stupid people, it took a great deal to get an idea into the king's head, but once there, there was no shifting it.
Richard Killeen
Higher intelligence is not necessarily something you’re born with or genetically predisposed toward. In fact, most instances of above-the-ordinary intelligences are usually acquired thru superior learning techniques ... Reading about the greatest minds in history, including recent history, more often than not reveals the individuals concerned (or people close to them) employed specific learning methods.
James Morcan
Richard seemed to like our morning conversations about Brecht and Althusser and Andre Gorz, but later on he turned the group against me for being too cerebral and acting like a boy. And weren't all these passionate interests and convictions just evasions of a greater truth, my cunt? I was an innocent, a de-gendered freak, 'cause unlike Liza Martin, who was such a babe she refused to take her platforms off for Kundalini Yoga, I hadn't learned the trick of throwing sex into the mix.
Chris Kraus
The purpose of having the orphans study all these diverse fields was not for them to just become geniuses, but to become polymaths – meaning they would be geniuses in a wide variety of fields.
James Morcan
How can I survive without a book to read?
David Hill
It's better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill -- getting larger cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.
Chris Kraus
...we could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words'...
Janet Frame
The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone - reading between the lines - has become the secret friend of their author.
Katherine Mansfield
If women have failed to make “universal” art because we’re trapped within the “personal,” why not universalize the “personal” and make it the subject of our art?
Chris Kraus
When the music comes, you try to see it shining between your eyes. Like threads stretched taut and the notes as colored beads threaded on. When you get very good, it's as if you can see inside the music, through it. You bring the music alive, bring it into being. As if you're the one composing.
Anna Smaill
I am not an actress. I am a mistress of disguise. Acting happens to be one of the perks
Janna Cachola
As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realise that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie: bad characters invite invention.
Chris Kraus
We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?
Chris Kraus
When the form's in place, everything within it can be pure feeling.
Chris Kraus
If art's a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become the subject too.
Chris Kraus
A woman with vision is unstoppable, a woman who is always increasing her skills multiplies. Along with passion this woman is undeniable.
Janna Cachola
Ever since I was 12 years old, my mother have always taught me to learn to be a leader. To start learning now! When you have the time to take time to learn and have every chance to be mentored. Don't be ashamed to be high maintenance when it comes to development.
Janna Cachola