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Patricia Grace
71 quotes
“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...”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From the Centre: A writer's life (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.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Grace, From the Centre: A writer's life (2021), extract in "'I never found myself in a book': Patricia Grace on the importance of Māori literature", The Guardian.
“This first part of the story is about two sisters, Ngarua and Maraenohonoho, who quarrelled over a canoe.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: beginning of Dogside Story (2001)
“The days before my wedding were full and busy ones but more so for my mother than for any of us. It was summer, with the sun skidding day after day across a flawless ice-blue sky, taking with it all moisture from creeks and pastures, draining the hills and gullies to a sleek ivory. It was the nearest we would get to a white Christmas in these parts.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mutuwhenua : the moon sleeps (1978), first lines
“The city was a great loom weaving its tangles and tufts of people into haphazard multicoloured fabric.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mutuwhenua : the moon sleeps (1978), chapter 17
“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.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Valley" short story collected in Waiariki (1975)
“I grew up amid two worlds, having close, continuous and frequent contact with each. These were two different and contrasting spheres that I inhabited, both full of life and vitality: my mother's Pākehā family and my father's Māori whānau. (chapter 2 p18)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I found this to be a way that works for me--placing myself at the centre, keeping characters and ideas close, and from the centre reaching to the outer circles, in any direction, for what I need in order to bring everything together. (chapter 18, p189)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“['Reading Readiness'] aligns with the whakatauāki 'A tōna wā ka mōhio.' 'In their own time they will know.' So, whether actual word recognition and textual meaning begins at four, or five, or eight, or later, what does it matter? There's a whole lifetime of reading exploration ahead as long as the interest has been fostered. Building towards that time of readiness, and children being successful in the building, was what mattered. (chapter 17 p180)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I left teaching, I imagined myself spending every possible minute scribbling, or sitting for hours in front of the computer, and for some months this is what I did. But I soon came to realise that, for me, the writing life needs real life and interaction going on. So, though I did spend time writing every day, often long hours on week days, I found myself caught up in the many activities associated with family and community life as well. (chapter 19, p214)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's what I like to do--describe settings and circumstances, create images, and in so doing expose my own emotional responses to time and place. Underlying it, though, is an anxiety, the concern that it could all slip away, or that we could slip away from it; that we who walk the Earth, treading so heavily and selfishly, could be the authors of our own demise. We have to do better. (chapter 27 p297)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be well in spirit is the most important health. [She] was the song of that run-down house. She was its roof, its walls, its windows, its doors. She was its song. To be well in spirit is the most important wellness. To be well in spirit lifts the physical and mental state to an extraordinary level. All are affected by it. Dark thoughts disappear.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm not sure of the reason for it, but during those days of caring for [her], my thoughts would often return to the time of my childhood when I would hear the old people say that we earthlings are related to the stars. The stars are our flesh and blood. I came to understand that this must be true in the deepest sense. We come from the dust of stars. (chapter 27 p213)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You and I grew together and we are inside each other's hearts. We don't have to explain. We know. We understand. (Chapter 25 p198)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are reasons we become ill or dispirited. It's what Oriwia was referring to. There's always a cause. Sometimes we bring sickness or punishment upon ourselves through carelessness, distraction, transgression, or failing to dedicate the day or the task. Weak moments may invite wrong forces. Sometimes sickness is caused by a vengeful person such as Oriwia describes. I have seen those affected by the spite of others become ill, go mad, become lame, turn black, drop dead, die slowly. I have seen their children born with ailments and deformities. (Chapter 25 p198)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Salt cures. Sea washes. It cleans. Expanse enlivens the spirit, frees the mind.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“there's singing in the mountains, laughter in the trees, dancing in the light of evening fires. There's whispering in hearts and minds and shadows. That's enough for me. (chapter 31 p238)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dear Rimini and Benedict, You didn't deserve ill-humour and rebuff, and I had no right to send you off with empty hearts when all you were asking was to get to know your 'father'. 'Father' is what you said. You probably think I'm still a bit loony. It's probably true. After you'd gone I kept thinking about my war notebooks. Everything I could tell you, more than I could ever tell you about your 'father', is contained in them.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only [he] could secure me, he being as rooted to the earth as a tree is. Only he could free me from raging forever between earth and sky - which is a predicament of great loneliness and loss. (Roimata, chapter 3 p23)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“although the stories all had different voices, and came from different times and places and understandings, though some were shown, enacted or written rather than told, each one was like a puzzle piece which tongued or grooved neatly to another. And this train of stories defined our lives, curving out from points on the spiral in ever-widening circles from which neither beginnings nor endings could be defined. (Roimata, chapter 5 p41)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Nothing wrong with money as long as we remember it's food not God. You eat it, not worship it...' (chapter 13 p94)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The stories had changed. It was as [he] had said, the stories had changed. And our lives had changed. We were living under the machines, and under a changing landscape, which can change you, shift the insides of you. (Roimata, ch23 p151)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She did not agree with our acceptance of a situation, which was not a deep-down acceptance, but only a waiting one. She saw the strength of a bending branch to be not in its resilience, but in its ability to spring back and strike. (Roimata, chapter 23 p152)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The hills did not belong to us any more. At the same time we could not help but remember that land does not belong to people, but that people belong to the land. We could not forget that it was land who, in the beginning, held the secret, who contained our very beginnings within herself. It was land that held the seed and who kept the root hidden for a time when it would be needed. We turned our eyes away from what was happening to the hills and looked to the soil and to the sea. (Roimata, chapter 16 p110)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything we need is here, but for some years we had had little contact with other people as we struggled for our lives and our land. It was good now to know new people and to feel their strength. It was good to have new skills and new ideas, and to listen to all the new stories told by all the people who came. It was good to have others to tell our own stories to, and to have them there sharing our land and our lives. Good had followed what was not good, on the circle of our days. (Toko, chapter 21 p145)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...gifts are legacies, that once given cannot be taken away. They may pass from hand to hand, but once held they are always yours. The gift we were given is with us still. (Roimata, chapter 25 p159)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...the scars will heal as growth returns, because the forest is there always, coiled in the body of the land. (Roimata, chapter 26 p169)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She told of gifts that she'd been given, and how gifts once given cannot be taken away and do not change. Gifts did not change even though there could be a shifting in the self caused by pain. (The Stories, chapter 28 p174)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People are strength too. Care for people and you are cared for, give strength to people and you are strong. It's land and people that are a person's self, and to give to the land and to give to the people is the best taonga of all. Giving is strength. We've always known it..." (The Stories, chapter 28 p176)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The old woman sang of a time gone ahead, and of those already walking ahead of her on the pathways. Her eyes were reddened as though they bled. And her songs, like the pathways, were interweavings of times and places and of all that breathed between earth and sky. And the pathways and the songs went into a time beyond the thumbing down of the eyelids. (The Stories, chapter 28 p180)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...the telling was not complete. As the people slept there was one more story to be told, a story not of a beginning or an end, but marking only a position on the spiral. (The Storles, chapter 28 p180)”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted by Charlotte Graham-McLay in "Patricia Grace's literary legacy: giving Māori characters their 'natural' voice", The Guardian, 23 February 2020.
“I was okay about being Māori. I was okay about being brown, because this had been reinforced positively by my parents and their families. But I always had it in the back of mind, these people don't understand. They don't know. Along with that there was often the assumption that I wasn't clean, I wasn't clever, you know. These were the things that hurt me.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Author interview on Radio New Zealand, 11 May 2021.
“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.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Author interview on Radio New Zealand, 11 May 2021.
“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.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have a confidence now that I didn’t have in the early days, when I’d sometimes think ‘This is too terrible. I’m never going to be able to do this.’ I never feel like that now. I know there’s always going to be a way, or that you can just chuck something out if it’s too annoying. That’s a solution as well.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That’s what I like to do. I just start out and follow the characters.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People need to inhabit the work. I’ve always been interested in writing about those interrelationships – especially the intergenerational ones. It’s a matter of finding ways of doing that which enable different characters to have clear identity. Storytelling is one way I’ve found very useful – having different characters telling about the same things, each one bringing a new aspect and further enlightenment to the accounting.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Learning about each other is not as one-sided as it used to be.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more I look into these matters the more I think that what happened to the baby happened for the same reason that land is taken, or cultural items, or indigenous knowledge. It's a new area of colonisation.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why is it that one set of stories is called "mythology", and another set of stories is called "the truth"?”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I get really stuck I want to get back to nothing, to nothing at all, so that I can allow 'something' to come. It's a clearing.... For me te kore is part of the process of writing, of searching, of starting out with nothing and making something of it.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“("have you ever thought of yourself as a member of a corpus of post-colonial writers?") I try to keep away from that sort of vocabulary and theorising. I'm aware of my work being classified, but don't want to be influenced in any way by those classifications — or by reviews or analyses. I need to keep myself as free as I can from commentary. I have to judge my own work for myself, do things my own way, make my own choices and decisions. I must own what I do. Once a work has been published it's been given. It's gone.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To me, 'sovereignty ' means having authority over one's own life and culture. It is a right and something that should not have to be fought for. Terms such as 'self-determination' are not high enough, not good enough terms for this”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Decolonisation' is what needs to happen in the minds and understandings of everyone, including Maori, so that issues can be properly addressed and equity brought about. There can't be equality, no matter how many catch-up policies are instigated, until the issues of racism and decolonisation are addressed.”
Patricia Grace (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source